


Pickaxe

by s0ymilk



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Child Abuse, Drug Use, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Original Character(s), Pre-Canon, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, basically anything you can think of for Andrew's background, no comfort, say it again for the people in the back
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-03-06 00:08:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 25,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13399212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s0ymilk/pseuds/s0ymilk
Summary: Andrew did not spring into the world fully formed.Most memories of his childhood make him wish he that he had.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Since finishing AFTG, I've had a huge interest in exploring Andrew's background and what made him like he is. This fic will follow him from early childhood until the beginning of the AFTG. I've done my best to keep everything canon (including Nora's extra content), but I may have slipped up here and there because there's a LOT. If you see anything particularly glaring, let me know. 
> 
> As far as sensitive content: I haven't covered every traumatic experience in Andrew's childhood re: abuse because I feel that would be beating a dead horse, but what I do cover is happening in the story in real time. I've done my best to handle each scene with the gravity and care it deserves, but let's be real - this is rough content. Take care of yourselves. And always let me know if you need me to tag something or want a run-down of a chapter before you read it.

“Thought we were getting a girl.” Andrew’s new foster father says from his chair in the living room. Andrew hugs his stuffed bear closer and buries his face in it under the scrutiny. A gentle hand settles on top of his head, a comforting weight, and pushes him towards the kitchen.

“They needed somewhere for him right away, so I said we would take him.” his new foster mother says as they cross in front of the chair. The man in the chair is the same age as his last foster dad, bearded, wearing a stained white t-shirt and torn jeans. The television is turned to the Andy Griffith show. Andrew feels eyes on his face and looks away, shy.

“Guess that’s alright, then.” the man grumbles, and goes back to his show.

His foster mother seats him at the table and tuts over him. She doesn’t pull his bear away from him like the last one, just gives him a glass of milk and a couple of cookies on a napkin.

“It’s too bad they cut this.” she says, patting him on the head again. “I bet you have very pretty hair.”

“Gina said I had bugs on my head.” Andrew says quietly. “So they had to shave it.”

“Well, it’ll grow back out, I suppose.”

His foster mother looks like a nice lady. She is round and has bushy hair and her lipstick is bright orange, and she ties an apron around her waist as she starts cooking dinner on the stove. In the living room, his foster father curses. His foster mom sets her spoon down hurriedly and goes to check on him.

“May I have more milk, please?” Andrew mutters when she comes back. The strained look on her face melts into a smile as he holds up the glass.

“What good manners you have.” she says approvingly. “They’re the ticket to everything, you know. I can just tell you’re going to be a very good boy for us, aren’t you Andrew?”

Andrew drinks his milk, and eats his cookies, and vows to be a _very_ good boy for his new family, and to always say please and thank you and to help with cooking and cleaning. He doesn’t want to move again, so maybe if he is very good, they will keep him.

\--

“Please s-stop. I don’t want to.”

His voice is hesitant and confused. He doesn’t know what’s going on, only that he doesn’t like it, and he wishes his foster mother was here, but she’s out shopping, and it’s only him and his foster father and this dark, dark room.

A heavy hand settles on his head. There’s nothing to hold on to, but the weight is enough. Andrew has to be good. If he is good, he will get to stay.

“Please,” he says.

\--

On Andrew’s eighth birthday, his foster mother walks into the bedroom and finds out about the game that his foster father plays with him. She doesn’t say anything, just disappears from the doorway with a soft sound. His foster father hurriedly buttons his pants and follows her.

Andrew tiptoes into the kitchen to find a birthday cake on the counter and two balloons swaying gently in the breeze made by the ceiling fan. His foster mother is crying. His foster father is gone, the front door slamming shut.

He takes a step toward her, but she looks up at him and flinches away. Andrew takes a step back, then flees to his room.

He was _bad._ He used his manners, and he did what he was told, even though he didn’t want to, but somehow he's still messed it all up. He wants desperately to make it okay again, but he doesn’t know what to do, so he just hugs his bear and cries into its fur.

They don’t eat the birthday cake, and he doesn’t get the balloons. Instead, the next day, a man who Andrew knows is a Social Worker comes and helps Andrew pack up his things. His foster mother watches him, but she does not hug him, and she does not say goodbye. The Social Worker buckles him in the backseat, and they drive away.

\--

The next family lives in a nice neighborhood, with green lawns and big, pretty houses and porch swings, and his family is a young couple with a girl a few years older than him. She doesn’t seem to like him much, but Andrew thinks that if he tries hard enough, she will like him. Maybe she’d like to hold his bear. Andrew vows to find out.

The young couple is very nice, but they are busy because he is a Doctor and she is a Lawyer, so it’s often just him and Grace in the house together. Andrew offers her his bear, but she bats it out of his hands. He tries to play games with her, but she calls him a baby and pushes him on the ground. Finally, Andrew learns to leave her alone. But even this isn’t the right thing, because she just gets madder and hits him more.

He escapes outside and scrambles onto the lowest branch of the sprawling tree in the front yard, because he’s been told he can’t leave the yard but he needs to get away because he’s tired of being pinched. He thinks he’s safe, until Grace hikes up her pink dress and climbs up after him. Then he’s reaching for the next branch, and the next, and Grace is faster than he is because she’s bigger and older, so he tries to climb even faster, and he looks down and the ground is so far away, and then he reaches for the next branch and -

His foot slips.

He wakes up in a bed in a white room, hooked up to some kind of weird-looking machine. Both his legs and one arm are in casts and there is something stiff and uncomfortable around his neck, keeping him from turning it.

He lays there for a little while until a lady comes in with a clipboard and smiles at him. She is wearing a dark blue outfit with dinosaurs on it.

“Nice to see you awake, AJ! I’m afraid you’ve had a little tumble, so you’ve been brought to the hospital. But we’re going to take care of you, okay? How do you feel?”

“Thirsty.” he manages. His voice is hard to hear because his throat is scratchy. But the nurse understands, and brings him a cup with a straw in it so he can drink some water.

“I’m just going to check you over a little bit, okay? You’re a very brave boy, you know. You fell out of a very high tree.”

“Is my family going to come get me?” Andrew asks. The nurse pauses where she’s checking the machine next to his bed, then turns an even bigger smile on him that looks fake. Andrew knows what fake smiles look like.

“I think they’re going to find you an even better one, honey. Just as soon as you’re all healed up. Okay?”

She brings him a bear, but it’s too small and the wrong colour. Andrew knocks it onto the ground and tells her he doesn’t want it. It makes her frown, which Andrew doesn’t like, but she takes the bear away. Afterwards, he feels bad about it, but he can’t bring himself to ask for the bear back.

Andrew never climbs a tree again.

\--

His next family is a crowded house. He shares a little room with two other, older boys, who make him take the top bunk in the bunk bed even though he tells them he’s scared of heights.

“What a pussy.” one says, and shoves him. They are older, and much bigger, and Andrew gets up and tries to shove them back, but they just laugh and push him over again.

“Shut the hell up, will you?” his new foster mother calls from the living room, where she is smoking a cigarette and watching _Wheel of Fortune._ Rather than leaving him alone, the two boys clap a hand over his mouth so he can’t make any sound and punch him until he cries.

That year he get 100’s on every spelling test, and his teacher gives him a gold star on his paper each time, but when he tries to show his foster mother, she just grunts and flicks him away, like a piece of garbage. One time, he leaves the paper for her, but when he finds it in the trash later, he stops trying. He keeps the gold stars for himself, like shiny little trophies tucked into the side pocket of his school bag.

One night he wakes up to one of his foster brothers dangling him over the edge of his bed. The ground looks dizzyingly far away. Andrew screams, scrabbles for his foster brother’s shirt, and tries to yank himself back up onto the bed. His foster brother goes toppling off the bed to the floor and lets out a scream of his own.

“I can’t keep him.” his foster mother says to the lady behind the desk the next morning, at the social services office. “He’s violent. He broke one of my other kid’s arms last night.”

The woman looks down at Andrew, who is standing at her side with his bag, fingers gently tracing the edges of the black eye that’s blurring one side of his vision.

“He got that when he fell off the bed.” his foster mother says. “Anyway, can you take him today?”

\--

His next foster family only has him for a few weeks before he is woken up in the middle of the night and carefully ushered into a waiting car, still half-asleep. Police cars are lined up and down the street, their lights blinding to his sleepy eyes. Andrew is too tired to care very much, and goes back to sleep.

“Can you tell us what was going on?” he gets asked the next morning, by a lady in a police uniform holding a notepad and a fancy pen.

“I dunno. There were always people showing up after I went to bed and going into the basement. And it smelled funny in there.”

“What did it smell like?” the woman asks. Andrew looks down and plays with the hem of his shirt.

“Dunno. Like burnt stuff. Are they in trouble?”

The woman’s eyes are sympathetic as she looks at him. “Yes, it turns out they were bad people. I’m sorry, honey, but I’m sure they’ll find you another really great family to stay with, okay?”

“Who cares?” Andrew says, kicking the table leg with one scuffed sneaker. “If they’re not, you’ll just move me somewhere else anyway.”

The policewoman’s smile is strained as she ushers him out the door.

\--

“We’ve found you another foster family, AJ.” his therapist says as she shuffles the papers on his desk. “They’re going to take you in next week. Isn’t that exciting?”

Andrew shrugs. It doesn’t faze her; she turns that thousand-watt smile on him and starts asking him more questions as she fiddles with the things on her desk. The barrage is ceaseless; question after question after prodding question, every minute detail of his apathetic replies picked apart and analyzed for meaning. He _hates_ coming to see her, and the minutes drag on until the clock hits 3, when Andrew can finally flee towards the door.

“Andrew,” she says, and he stops sullenly, turning to look at her. “I’m a bit concerned by your lack of progress. I’m thinking maybe we should bump your sessions up to twice a week. What do you think?”

He knows that his expression changes, because her smile grows wider. “Whatever.” he says, and leaves.

\--

As it turns out, breaking people’s arms is a pretty good way to keep them from bullying him.

He bloodies a boy’s nose for calling him a faggot at recess (Andrew doesn’t really know what a faggot is, but it sounds like an insult). He pushes a girl into a mud puddle for laughing at his clothes. A schoolmate sprains his ankle when he ‘accidentally’ trips over Andrew’s foot during gym class. And finally, Andrew gets expelled from his school for threatening to stab a pimply-faced junior high kid with a pair of scissors.

“It’s not just that you threatened to stab him, Andrew.” the principal explains to him sternly. “It’s that the teacher stopped you mid-swing.”

Andrew looks away. He’d enjoyed the adrenaline rush of the fight, but it’s worn off now, and the whole thing has become boring. The principal lectures him for another few minutes, but gives up with a sigh when Andrew just lays his head back and closes his eyes.

His next foster family gives him up. So does the next. And the next.

\--

The two teachers on lunch duty are arguing, and it’s giving him a headache.

“The problem is that all the jobs are going to illegal immigrants.” says his science teacher, who is a fat woman who wears outfits in blistering shades of purple at least three times a week and has a face like a fish.

“Statistics show it has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The problem is that jobs are being outsourced to foreign countries because labor is cheaper there. Why pay an American minimum wage when you can pay somebody in China fifteen cents?”

That’s his math teacher, a tall man with long curly hair that had dressed up as Waldo for Halloween and explained equations using a toy tractor. Neither of them know what they’re talking about.

Their argument only gets louder and louder as Andrew pokes at his cold cheese pizza. He has an assigned seat next to the teachers on duty because he ‘can’t keep his hands to himself if he’s not supervised’, or so the principal of his new school says. It wasn’t his hand that was the problem last time though, it was the plastic fork he’d broken in half and threatened to shove into somebody’s throat.

His head is starting to hurt. They need to stop arguing.

“The problem isn’t immigrants or people in China, it’s robots. Technology.” Andrew says irritably, and both of his teachers stop and look at him. His science teacher’s eyebrows are raised so high, they might as well be part of her hairline.

“Robots are the main reason that jobs are going away, because they cost less money than people do. But they also mean workers can make more stuff and create new jobs. The jobs that are moving to other countries are ones we don’t want anyway, because they don’t take much education.” The _Forbes_ article had used some other term - skill? No-skill jobs? Andrew can’t remember exactly, he’d been distracted while he was reading it.

His teachers are still both staring at him still, which only irritates him more. He’s _twelve,_ not some stupid baby, and these teachers are too stupid to know what they’re talking about and he wants them to shut up.

“You’re pretty smart, aren’t you, Andrew?” his math teacher says finally, with a widening smile. Andrew blinks, and realizes he’s made a very big mistake.

They try to put him in advanced classes, but he breaks a kid’s nose and gets kicked out again. From then on, he never opens his mouth in school ever again.


	2. Chapter 2

“This is our son, Drake.” his new foster mom says cheerfully. She wraps her arm around a teenager, maybe 17, and grins cheerfully at Andrew. “Your social worker thought you might benefit from having another boy around.”

“Yippee.” Andrew says coolly. The smile on her face falls slightly. Andrew scowls at her, but inside he winces a little bit. She’d been nice to him so far; maybe he should try to play good, at least for her.

He has his own bedroom here, with dark blue sheets and a desk at one end with a cheap black lamp on it. Andrew expects his foster mother to hover, but she just leaves him to his business and shuts the door behind her. He locks it, throws his bag on the floor, and collapses on the bed.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed when a gentle knock on his door pulls him back to the present. He shifts a bit, but doesn’t get up.

“Dinner’s ready.” his foster mother calls through the door softly. “It’s chicken and rice. Nothing fancy, but there’s pie for dessert.”

After a moment, the footsteps fade. They return twenty minutes later, and there’s a slight thump as something is set on the ground.

“If you get hungry.” is all she says.

When he’s sure she’s really gone, Andrew opens the door and finds a plate of food covered in tin foil on the carpet. The food is nothing special, but Andrew hasn’t eaten all day, and he scarfs it down like a starving man.

Cass continues to knock every night around seven, and come back twenty minutes later with a full plate. Finally, after a full two weeks, Andrew makes his way down and into the dining room. Cass, Drake, and Cass’s husband look up at him as he steps into the room, but conversation pauses only for a minute.

Then Andrew is seated at the table, and a bowl of potato salad is being passed to him, and Cass is smiling, softly and kindly, and Andrew feels for the first time in a long time that maybe he wants to smile back.

\--

It had been gentle the first time. Andrew’s old foster dad had coaxed him in with a promise of a game, and he’d been young and confused and unsure. Andrew can’t believe he’d ever been _stupid_ enough to not know what was happening, but he was. So he’d done what he was told, and he’d kept it ‘their little secret’, until his foster mother had found out and returned him.

There have been others. The older Andrew gets, the less it becomes 'our little game'. They know Andrew isn't stupid enough to fall for that these days. 

This time, there’s nothing gentle about it. Andrew steps into his room and someone grabs him roughly by the back of the neck and pushes him into the bed. He can barely breathe where his face is pushed into the bedspread. His bag is pulled from his hand and thrown on the floor.

“Tell anyone and you’re fucking dead.” Drake hisses into his ear. His hands pull at Andrew’s wrists, tugging them above his head and trapping them there. Andrew’s heart is beating like a bird trapped in a too-small cage.

“Go to hell,” Andrew tries, but it sounds small and panicked, not fierce or defiant like he meant it. Drake laughs at him and shoves him harder into the mattress.

“You think anybody would believe you? You think my _mom_ would believe you?” he says scornfully. “She’ll put you back in the system before you can even blink. Why would she believe a little shit like you over her own son?”

 _Cass._ Andrew thinks about telling her, about packing up his clothes and his books into his little bag and leaving again, and never seeing her face again. Never going grocery shopping with her, or sitting at the table doing homework, or listening to her giggle at her own bad jokes in the car.

He can’t. He _can’t_ lose Cass. She’s all he has.

He buries his head further into the mattress.

\--

“Oh, AJ,” Cass says sadly, one hand cradling his cheek gently. Andrew scowls, but lets her tilt his head up so she can examine the scrapes near his chin and the blood dripping from his nose. “Another fight?”

“They were asking for it.” Andrews says shortly. That’s all he offers, because that’s all he can say without turning the statement into a lie, and he doesn’t want to lie to Cass. She’s too good for that.

If she were thinking just a little bit harder, she would wonder why he hasn’t cleaned himself up though he’s been home for almost two hours at this point. But Cass expects the best of people, and when the best isn’t available, she expects honesty. Misdirection isn’t a part of her vocabulary.

Andrew _had_ fought two boys today, but it had been when he was skipping his sixth period and smoking a cigarette near the football field. He’d left them sobbing in the grass without getting so much as a scratch. Then he’d come home, and Drake had glanced over at him from the kitchen counter and smiled, very slowly.

“Leave it alone, Cass. I’ll go clean it up.” Andrew says, batting her hand away where she’s prodding at his sore nose. She huffs in disappointment, but lets him step out of her space.

“I bought some chocolate at the grocery store today. If you help me make dinner, we can make hot chocolate afterwards.” she says conspiratorially, returning to the mound of groceries that are laid across the kitchen floor. She’d thrown them down as soon as she’d seen him, which means apples and cans of green beans are strewn haphazardly across the floor. Andrew spots the bars of chocolate peeking out from one overturned bag.

“You don’t have to bribe me to get help with dinner.” he says with a roll of his eyes. “I’ll be right back.”

They make cornflake chicken with mashed potatoes for dinner, and afterwards when Drake and his father are watching some gorey action movie in the living room, Andrew and Cass do the dishes and then heat up a saucepan full of milk. Andrew stirs the chocolate into it as Cass adds sugar, salt, and vanilla extract, and then they pour the mixture into mugs and sit at the kitchen bar together. Cass puts extra marshmallows into his mug like he’s five, and Andrew lets her and says nothing.

And they sit and talk, and Cass laughs, and Andrew smiles.

\--

“Can I start going to the library after school?” Andrew asks one day, as they’re driving home. Cass makes a contemplative noise.

“Will you promise to be good when you’re walking home?” she asks after a moment.

It’s not been easy, but Andrew’s almost completely stopped getting into fights at school, even though it means he’s had to take a few punches to the face. And he’s not failing his classes any more; Cass had beamed at his last report card and given him twenty dollars, with the promise of more if he could get straight C’s on the next one. Andrew knows he can, he just hasn’t cared enough to.

“Yeah. I won’t cause any trouble. I just want to use the computer there, if that’s okay.”

He doesn’t really, truly expect Cass to say yes. She doesn’t have any reason to. Every other adult thinks that Andrew needs watching, needs constant surveillance and intervention in case he attacks someone, and the idea of letting him be _alone_ in the library for two whole hours and walk home without an adult is crazy. Andrew’s therapist had told Cass just last week that Cass should be monitoring what he’s watching on TV because too much violence might make him worse.

“Okay. I trust you.” Cass says, and Andrew stills.

He doesn’t want to, but he can’t help it; the corners of his lips stretch upwards until he’s grinning ear-to-ear, and Cass flicks her eyes towards him and smiles in reply before returning her gaze to her driving.

Andrew gets one whole week, _five days_ of staying at the library by himself and walking home, and he doesn’t get into a single fight and the librarian has started greeting him by name when he walks in. And then he is curled up in a chair one day, reading about Abraham Lincoln, when a shadow falls over him and he looks up.

“So this is where you’ve been.” Drake says, smiling down at him. He’s put on forty pounds since he joined the football team and started wearing stupid-looking caps and tank tops with big armholes cut into them that show his entire torso. “It’s hard to find brotherly time together now that Mom and Dad are getting home before you do.”

“Leave me alone.” Andrew says. His voice cracks in the middle of it. Drake just shoots him a smile and saunters away, before sitting down at a table across the room and pulling out his phone. Andrew tries to go back to his book, but he can see Drake out of the corner of his eye.

Watching. Waiting.

When he finally gets up and walks out of the library, Drake grabs him by the arm and tows him towards the stand of trees behind the building. The leaves are dense, and by the time Drake stops, Andrew can’t see the library at all.

For the first time, he doesn’t cry at all. He just stares at the ground and drifts, his mind blank, and the pain fades away too. Drake shoves his face into the dirt, but even that doesn’t break his stupor. The feeling lasts even after Drake leaves, after Andrew picks himself up and rubs at the grass stains on his jeans, all through his walk home.

He never goes back to the library.

\--

Richard doesn’t like him very much. Andrew gathers, from overheard conversations, that he’d opposed taking Andrew on, especially seeing as how he was their first foster child. He had _concerns,_ he said, Andrew’s report said he had anger issues -

And Cass, of course, had come immediately to his defense. _He’s been through a lot, honey. Let’s give him a chance. He’s been very sweet so far, better even than Drake was at that age. He was a handful, remember?_

It doesn’t change Richard’s opinion. Andrew sees it in his eyes when he walks into the room. He notices how Richard doesn’t touch him, or even get close to him. Frankly, Andrew couldn’t care less; in fact, he kind of likes it, because his string of foster fathers has been, on the whole, shit. If Richard had shown so much as an ounce of interest in him, Andrew would have run the opposite way as fast as possible. He doesn’t want to find out if ‘like father, like son’ works the other way around as well.

Anyway, Cass is enough. Sweet, gentle Cass, who has a fashionable blonde bob that looks wrong around her middle-aged face and wears chunky long necklaces that get stuck on everything all the time. Cass who makes him hot chocolate, and thanks him every night for helping with dinner even though it’s been months now and Andrew just can’t see it, can’t see how she raised such a _dipshit_ for a son.

But then he sees how she looks at him, like he walks on water, how he wraps her around his little finger and never, ever gets scolded for anything, and maybe he gets it, just a little bit. Drake takes what he wants because he’s been doing it since he’d been born. If Andrew had had somebody like this when he was young, he would have cherished her every day, and done everything he could to make her happy, but Drake has no fear of losing her, so he drinks and cusses and disappears until far after curfew and ignores every sad and disappointed look Cass gives him. But then the next morning, _He’s going into the Marines, you know, my son grew up before I even knew it! I’m just so proud of him!_ On the phone with her friend Sherry.

Andrew doesn’t care. Drake is a small price to pay to keep her. And if Drake isn’t going to give her the love she deserves - Andrew will do it in his place. Cass deserves a son that appreciates her. If Andrew plays his cards right, he’ll get to be that son.


	3. Chapter 3

Andrew cuts himself one night chopping vegetables. Cass has just had the knives sharpened, so even though he hadn’t applied much pressure when his hand had slipped, the slit on the meaty part of his hand is bloody and stings. 

Cass sees it and immediately begins  _ hovering.  _ Andrew huffs at her and tells her it’s fine, but he lets her wash it and bandage it anyway, because she’s a true mother hen and he can let her do this if it really makes her that happy. 

“Let me finish the vegetables, you watch that pan.” she says, once he's been pulled back from the brink of death. Andrew does so obediently. 

This has become their routine - cooking together while Drake and his father watch football or Exy in the living room. They wash the dishes after dinner and sometimes Andrew will bring his homework down and do it at the kitchen table, so Cass can see that he’s actually putting effort into his schoolwork (she always tries to help him with his math, even though she has no idea what she’s talking about). 

She brings him a bowl of ice cream tonight and rests one hand on his shorn hair. Andrew can’t help but close his eyes for a moment, enjoying the feel of her cool hand against his scalp. It’s been three months. Longer than half of his other foster homes have lasted. 

“I’m really glad you came here, AJ. I hope you know that.” she says. Andrew’s eyes flick up to hers involuntarily. She’s smiling in that way she does, where the crinkles at the corners of her eyes crease and her teeth shine white against the tan of her skin. Andrew doesn’t want to let it move him -  _ he’s fucking stronger than this -  _ but the smile is involuntary. 

Later that night, as Drake is lying on top of him, he grabs Andrew’s hand where it’s fisted in the sheets and squeezes. Andrew, who is trying to succeed at their little game of ‘Don’t make any noise’, lets out a muffled curse as Drake’s fingers dig into the cut. 

“Oh, what’s this? Did little AJ get a boo-boo?” Drake says from over his shoulder. He pulls the bandage off and twists Andrew’s hand around so he can see the red line. “This must be from when you were playing good little son in the kitchen. You think my mom sees you as a son? You don’t mean jack shit to her.” 

Drake’s thumb digs into the line. Andrew shoves his face into the mattress and hisses, his hand trying to jerk back out of Drake’s grasp. But the words echo in his head as he does. 

_ You think my mom sees you as a son?  _

Cass, washing his hand so gently, insisting on bandaging it herself. 

_ You don’t mean jack shit to her.  _

Her hand on his head, and her smile, just for him.

Every time Drake digs his finger into that little line, Andrew is transported back into the kitchen and that moment. He’s used to going quiet in his head when this happens, but now he goes somewhere safer and warmer. Drake thinks that by bringing him pain, he’s breaking him down. But he’s just reminding Andrew that something exists for him outside of this, something that belongs to Andrew alone. Drake can never touch it. 

The pain shoots through his hand, and he makes a noise, but it’s through smiling lips. 

\--

“I want to talk to you about something that I think will be very helpful for you, AJ.” 

His therapist has had a baby, gained fifty pounds, dyed her hair blonde, and nearly gotten a divorce since Andrew first starting seeing her. The one thing she hasn’t managed to change is her condescending method of attempting to drag answers out of him kicking and screaming. At this point, he spends most of his sessions attempting not to stab her with the knife he’s started carrying in his pocket. It’s a good exercise in self-control. 

“Of course, it’s totally your choice.” she continues, as if she hasn’t spent several years at this point attempting to make his choices for him. “But I think we should start considering putting you on some type of medica-” 

“ _ No. _ ” 

His voice is loud enough to echo against the walls, and harsher, much harsher now that it’s dropped permanently into a lower register. His therapist stops and blinks at him, but isn’t particularly cowed by a response that’s become old hat at this point. 

“AJ, like I said, it’s your choice, but-” 

“My choice. My answer is no.” he cuts in, his voice going from harsh to cold. She smiles at him, that  _ damned fake smile,  _ and opens her mouth again - 

Andrew is up before he knows it, and though he’s only just hit the five foot mark and doesn’t weigh 130 even sopping wet, the way he looms over her makes her freeze in place. She looks very old from this close up, and very weak, her orange-manicured fingernails gripping at the armrests of her chair as she trembles finely. 

“I. Said. No.” Andrew says softly into the silence of the room. He watches with satisfaction as her pupils dilate in terror. 

When he steps back, she flees the room, slamming the door shut behind her. Andrew sits on the couch and waits placidly until another social worker comes in, flanked by a security guard, and explains that due to his aggression, Dr. Hapsburg has refused to treat him further and he will have to be assigned a new therapist. 

Andrew wishes he’d realized before how effective a little intimidation is. Two years of annoyance from that woman, and she’s gone in an instant. 

He resolves, as Cass is driving him home, to use that tactic more often. 

\--

Fall comes, and the weather gets chillier. Andrew likes the colder months because it means he can don layers upon layers and not look strange about it. Drake had been enjoying watching Andrew try to explain away the cuts and bruises, but now that Andrew can cover them up, he turns his attention to more painful games. Andrew realizes one day as he looks in the mirror that a particularly nasty patch on his collarbone is visible through the thin material of his blue shirt, so he takes to wearing darker and darker clothing, until he just commits to black and is done with it. 

The clothing brings something else with it, and that’s the lines of stinging pain that Andrew begins to carve into himself at night. They give him something to ground himself against as Drake smothers him into the mattress or traps him up against the wall. Drake delights in ripping them open and watching Andrew whimper, but every time he does, it pulls Andrew farther and farther away from the white walls of Drake’s room. Before long, Andrew is ripping the cuts open himself. 

He has to talk Cass into a darker set of sheets, but it's worth it. 

Christmas day, Andrew is woken up by a mug of peppermint hot chocolate and dragged downstairs in his pajamas to find that ‘Santa’ has come in the middle of the night and left presents for him and Drake under the tree. Andrew dredges up a smile, just for Cass. 

“I think he knows by now that Santa isn’t real, Mom.” Drake says flippantly to his mother. He’s sprawled across the couch. “Pretty sure Santa wasn’t bringing him toys in the foster system.” 

“ _ Drake. _ ” Cass says, swatting her son on the knee. “Quit ruining our fun.” 

This is the first time Andrew has ever celebrated Christmas. He’d sat through plenty with different foster families, been excluded from the celebrations at a couple more, and contrary to what Drake said, he had actually received a few presents that had been donated by some charity or other to be given to kids in the system. But it’s nothing like this, with drinks and stockings and Cass handing out presents one by one. Andrew’s stocking holds several pounds of chocolate - enough to keep him fed for at least a day, Richard jokes - and he obediently holds up the sweater he unwraps so they can see if it fits, and Cass can fuss that it ‘matches your eyes, AJ, you’ll be so handsome.’ 

Andrew is unwrapping a smaller package - a book he’d mentioned wanting to check out, now he has his own copy and nobody will bitch if he dog-ears the pages - when Cass lets out a soft sound and Andrew looks up. 

She’s holding a small picture frame in one hand, the other over her mouth, and her eyebrows are creased together. Richard is smiling softly at his wife; Drake is looking suspiciously pleased with himself. 

“Dad printed it out so we could get it framed.” Drake says. His voice is pleasant, but his eyes settle on Andrew in a way that makes something curl up in his stomach. “Show it to AJ, I’m sure he’ll want to see it.” 

“Just like real brothers.” Cass says, and Andrew’s veins turn to ice. “Oh, I love it, you two.” 

And then she turns the photo to show Andrew, and he’s taking in the sight of Drake’s bed, covers rumped, and Drake and Andrew are asleep in the sheets, Drake’s hand wrapped possessively around Andrew’s wrist - 

Andrew is up before he knows it. Then he’s in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, wretching up a whole mug’s worth of hot cocoa and last night’s spaghetti. It plays over and over in his head, that image of the two of them laying there, and Cass’s smile, and they’d  _ fucking framed it.  _

_ Just like real brothers.  _ Andrew’s stomach heaves again. 

He tells Cass it was the cocoa, too much on an empty stomach, and spends the rest of the day lying in bed. He wants to sleep. Every time he closes his eyes, the image burns against the back of his eyelids. He can’t look at Cass, at Richard, and Drake smirks at him and he  _ fucking knew exactly what he was doing,  _ he’s a sick sadistic fuck, and Andrew wants nothing more than to gut him from his sternum to his limp, tiny - 

“Maybe I should go lay down with him for a while. It might make him feel better.” Drake’s voice drifts into his room. 

Andrew throws up again in the waste basket next to his bed. 


	4. Chapter 4

Something spooks Cass in the days that follow, between Christmas and New Year’s. She starts looking at Andrew when she thinks he’s not watching, something troubled in her eyes. Andrew checks that his sleeves are long enough, makes sure that his medical kit stashed in a drawer is hidden and out of sight, but he can’t find any reason for her to be acting that way.

He doesn’t get any answers until later, when the Oakland PD - sponsored youth recreation starts up again, and Andrew is grudgingly forced into goallieing for the soccer team again. Higgins pulls him aside after practice one day, shoves something in his hand, and gives him a long look.

“We need to talk.” he says solemnly. Andrew tries to glance at the note Higgins has given him, but Higgins’ hand closes over his, preventing him from doing so.

“I know you’ve been in the system a long time, kid. You ever considered you might have family outside of it?”

The question comes, in Andrew’s mind, totally from left field. “No,” he answers honestly. Higgins nods, like he expected that.

“Well, as it turns out, you do. A twin brother. He lives in San Jose, and he wants to talk to you. Told me to pass on his information. That’s it, there.”

Andrew unfolds the paper with numb hands. There, in Higgin’s blocky script, is a name, telephone number, and address. Aaron Minyard, San Jose. His twin brother.

His field of vision narrows to that name, and his body starts feeling peculiarly heavy. Andrew doesn’t know how long he stares at that name before Higgins smacks him on the shoulder, bringing him back to reality.

“Listen, before you call… you might want to talk to your mom about it. Cass, I mean.” Higgins says awkwardly.

“She knew about this?” Andrew asks harshly. Higgins flinches a little bit, so Andrew knows he’s right.

How fucking _dare her._

“How long?” he asks lowly. “How long have you known?”

“Just a few weeks, AJ. I saw him at a Raiders game right before Christmas and though he was you. Turns out you have a clone.”

Andrew bides his time for the right moment that moment, when he can get Cass alone. It’s hard to keep his cool until then, and they family notices, but they don’t push. Finally Drake and Richard are gone, and it’s just him and Cass in the kitchen, and Andrew turns to her. He notes that she’s already washing dishes nervously, as if she knows something she won’t like is about to happen.

“Cass.”

Cass puts down the serving dish carefully and turns to Andrew, but she doesn’t meet his eyes. The long necklace she’s wearing today had dipped into the water at some point and is dragging soap suds all over the front of her blouse. Her eyes are a bit red.

“When were you going to tell me I have a brother?”

Her eyes flick up to meet his, and that’s her undoing. With a soft little sound, she starts forward and wraps Andrew up in her arms, pressing her face to the top of his head. For possibly the first time since he’d accepted the Spear family, Andrew goes stiff in her embrace and considers pushing her off.

“I’m so sorry, AJ. Higgins told me right after he found out, and I called them to figure things out. It’s - complicated.” her voice cracks on the last word, a huff of hot breath against his scalp.

“Tell me, Cass.” when she doesn’t reply, Andrew pushes her off and backs a few steps away. Her face is sad and uncertain. “Tell. Me.”

She tries, but nothing seems to come out. She is saved, however, by another voice from behind them.

“Your brother lives with your biological mother. Right, Mom?” Drake says smoothly, leaning on the kitchen island. His eyes are fixed on Andrew, his lips stretched into a cold smile. “Mom called her, but she said she didn’t want to know about you. She gave you up at birth but kept your twin.”

“But you have us, AJ.” Cass interjects, her shaky and slightly shrill. “I know it’s not - not good news, but that doesn’t matter, because this is your home now.”

Her gaze is so uncertain and _vulnerable._ Andrew could break her apart right now with just the right words. A side of him wants to, because she thought she had the right to keep this from him. The other side wants to hold her and never let her go. _This is your home now._ Andrew doesn’t know if that’s true, but those words burn inside him like a brand, and he _wants._

“Maybe we can figure something out.” Drake suggests lightly, drawing their attention back to him. “AJ deserves to know his brother, right? Maybe we can invite him to come visit us, stay for a few weeks. It would be nice to have another pipsqueak around.”

Andrew’s body is so confused, looking back and forth between them, that he can’t decide whether he wants to be sick, or scared, or angry, or defeated. Drake’s secret little smile. Cass’s hopeful look. He could have a family. He could drag his brother down into the darkness that is his world. He’ll give himself up to keep Cass, give however much it takes, but his brother -

He can’t. He _can’t._

Andrew turns and flees.

\--

Later that night, when Drake comes to his room, he’s softer than normal in his touches. He moves Andrew like a precious thing, rather than a toy to be discarded. Andrew _hates_ it. He claws at Drake’s arms, tries to bite him, aims a kick as his stomach, but it’s not of any more use this time than it ever has been.

“It would be fun to have your brother here too, wouldn’t it?” he whispers. “I’d like to have both of you in my bed. A matched set.”

Andrew’s fingers dig into the lines on his arms, but suddenly they aren’t enough anymore to take him away from the now. His _brother._ Andrew feels like he is standing on the precipice of a great canyon and realizing that there are much worse things in the world than to simply jump.

“Maybe we can get Dad to take another photo to put up next to the other one, huh? You, me, and Aaron. My two sweet baby brothers. Picture perfect.”

“Please.” Andrew rasps out. He never thought he would say that word again. He _promised himself_ he never would. His promises don’t matter, here in the dark. Another thing broken.

“I’ll talk to Mom about it. I’m sure we can work something out.” Drake tells him.

**\--**

Andrew thinks his options over, makes a list in his head, and considers the options carefully. He knows what he _wants_ to do, but he also knows the consequences of going down that road. He’s not ready for that, not yet.

So he does the next-best thing. When he gets up the next morning, he tells Cass that he wants nothing to do with Aaron. He tells her if he finds out Cass is talking to them, he won’t go through with the adoption. Cass cries. Andrew watches her placidly, because some things are more important than his happiness. Some things are too precious to sacrifice.

He writes to Aaron, one short note stuffed into an envelope. _Don’t ever bother me again._ He hands it directly to the mailman, so he knows it will get there.

Then, two weeks later, he shrugs on a dark hoodie, checks his knives, and makes his way down to the closest convenience store. At 1 o’clock in the morning, it’s already closed for the night and the parking lot is totally clear. The walk is cold, considering it’s only March and the weather has yet to turn for the spring.

Andrew tugs one of his knives out and slots it in the half-inch gap between the front doors, lifting the simple latch that is the only actual lock the place has. He strolls in, locks it behind him, and surveys his new kingdom critically.

When the owner comes in at six AM, it’s to Andrew lying flat on his back on the counter, smoking a cigarette. There’s a mess of open candy bar wrappers and trinkets swiped off the counter littering the floor. Andrew glances over at the man, who stands frozen in the doorway for a moment and then flees. Andrew lights up another cigarette and closes his eyes.

The police, when they come fifteen minutes later, are more annoying. They haul Andrew off the counter, shove him into it as they cuff him, and march him harshly to the backseat of a squad car. He doesn’t bother answering any of the questions that are sent his way, just stares out the window.

The trip is long, because they have to take him to a juvenile detention center rather than a local jail. The cops in the front seat give up on interrogating him within the first twenty minutes and start talking to each other instead. Andrew doesn’t listen, because he doesn’t care.

\--

The detention center is large, squat, and grey. Andrew is yanked from the car and unceremoniously dragged inside. He does as he’s told, stripping for his intake shower with rough unscented soap and dressing again in the dark grey jumpsuit he’s given. He expects to be led to a cell or a room or something afterwards. The guard that’s been dragging him around brings him to an office instead. The woman inside is talking to somebody on the phone, but motions them in anyway. Andrew takes a seat in the chair he’s shoved into and waits. The guard moves back to lean against the wall, not far enough that Andrew doesn’t feel his heavy stare burning up the back of his neck though.

“AJ Doe?” the woman at the desk asks, flicking her eyes to him. He nods. She takes the phone from her ear and holds it out to him.

“Your mother is on the phone. Make it quick.”

Maybe one day Andrew will hear those words without getting a shiver down his back. Maybe one day he won’t think immediately of dinners cooked together and hot chocolate afterwards, of laughter and car rides and cold nights on the couch in front of stupid action movies that Cass only picks because she thinks Andrew likes them. Today is not that day, but it doesn’t matter, because Andrew knows what he has to do. He’s already made his choice.

He takes the phone. Then he says, loudly enough that it will be heard on the other end of the call, “She’s not my mother”, and he hangs up the phone.

The woman - _Warden Eva Mendez,_ the nameplate on her desk reads - doesn’t seem surprised. She just settles the phone more securely in the cradle and leans back in her chair to take a look at him.

“Welcome to Greenhall Facility for Juvenile Offenders, Mr. Doe. You’ll be staying here until your court date, and possibly beyond if you’re found guilty. Anything you’d like to say?”

She looks at him steadily, waiting for an answer. Andrew slumps back in his seat and stares at the ceiling. Remarkably, she doesn’t appear to be fazed. Maybe Andrew’s not as much of a unique snowflake as he thinks he is.

“Would you like to arrange for a lawyer? Public defender?” she asks him. He doesn’t answer.

A few more unsuccessful questions, then he’s hauled to his feet and dragged out of the office. A pillow, sheets, a blanket, and toiletries are stuffed into his hands. He’s led to a cell, pushed inside, and the door slammed shut.

Andrew tosses his things onto the floor, rolls onto the hard bed in the corner with his pillow, and falls asleep.

\--

Cass, Richard, and Drake come to his court case.

It’s the first time Andrew has had to see them. He’d refused Cass every time she came to Greenhall to see him, every phone call and even one pleading letter, which he’d thrown away unopened.

He’s still not too proud to admit that the sight of Cass nearly makes him falter. Her hair has grown out a bit and looks lopsided, like she hadn’t paid much attention when she’d been styling it this morning. There are large, dark circles under her red-rimmed eyes. She’s always been a crier.

This is perhaps the only time in his life that he will say he’s grateful for Drake’s presence. Because over Cass and Richard’s shoulder, Drake catches his eye and smiles. Andrew blinks, and he sees a dark bedroom and white sheets, and the sight of his neatly sliced arms against that background, red and stinging. He hears Drake, leaning over him, whispering in his ear. He imagines Drake’s hands on a boy that looks just like him, somebody that Andrew could have protected if he just made the right sacrifices.

He sees that photo hanging up on the wall, imagines another one right next to it.

“AJ, please.” he hears, to the side of him. Cass is there, already sobbing, her fingers crumbling a tissue as she looks at him.

He could go back. He could have Cass, beautiful, gentle Cass, and they could eat ice cream and do homework together and she could love him like her son. And Andrew would tear himself apart for it, right until the point he walked off the top of a building.

Andrew turns away without saying a word. His senses have gone so dull that he barely hears the anguished cry behind him. He sits where he is told, says what he is told to, and receives his sentence. Three years at Greenhall.

When he looks back, the Spear family is gone. Andrew notes dimly that he doesn’t much care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everybody that's taken a chance on this, and especially to the two that left me such fantastic comments! You guys rock.


	5. Chapter 5

For a while, things go very dim. Andrew wakes up, goes where he is told, eats when he is given food, sleeps when he can. He’s used to being able to close his eyes and recall every detail of a scene, but now he forgets whole days. The people around him are a soft, endless buzz that doesn’t even stir up annoyance in him. There is nothing. 

He is nothing. 


	6. Chapter 6

He gets a roommate, three months into his time at juvie. After lunch one day he comes back to his cell and finds a thin boy curled up on the other mattress, facing the wall. He doesn’t move when Andrew walks in. Andrew had been planning on taking a nap, but he lays down and stares at the ceiling instead.

\--

“Andrew, have you seen your roommate? He’s supposed to be here for group therapy as well.” the group therapist asks when he slouches in for the session. Most of the staff treat Greenhall exactly like what it is, but some (like the group therapist) insist on pretending it’s a happy place for kids with ‘minor issues’. A place where people have ‘roommates’.

This particular model is the latest in the line of group therapists that Andrew has to see with four others once a week. He’s balding, wears trendy thick-framed glasses, and can’t weigh over 100 pounds sopping wet, despite the fact that he’s several inches taller than Andrew. He dresses like he wants people to notice him. Andrew, if he cared enough to, would inform him that there’s nothing dashing or fashionable about pairing a shitstain-coloured button-down with a plum tie, especially when your trousers are a size too small and came from Target.

“I wasn’t aware I was his keeper.” Andrew drawls back, legs splayed and his hands tucked into the pockets of his issued hoodie. The other four kids for the session are already present. Most of them - for one reason or another - enjoy the group therapy, which Andrew doesn’t presume to understand but appreciates because it means he has to talk less.

The therapist sends one of the guards to check Andrew’s cell. The guard comes back fifteen minutes later shepherding Andrew’s roommate in front of him. Tall, thin, the kind of skin so dark it looks blue-black in the right light. Short, tightly curled hair. A broad nose under fierce eyes. He looks tired and not particularly happy to be here. _Join the fucking club_. The kid takes the only empty seat, the one next to Andrew, and looks at the group therapist expectantly.

“Nice of you to join us, Alton. It must have been difficult to find the only therapy room in the building.”

There’s that thread of condescension that Andrew hates, worming its way into the therapist’s voice. He thinks the kids that end up here are stupid, like they do it on purpose, and it makes something in his tiny lizard brain happy to treat them like hopeless cases. He’s the last person that should be coaching in a place like this, but detention halls are short-handed and they probably couldn't afford to turn him down.

“Go fuck yourself.” Andrew’s roommate says shortly. Andrew’s ears perk up the tiniest bit at the sweet harshness in his voice. He tracks the clench of the boy’s hand, the way he jerks just slightly as if to stand from his seat. He doesn’t, but he _wants_ to.

“Excuse me?” the therapist says, as if this is something he doesn’t hear flung back and forth regularly in this place. “Would you care to repeat that, Alton?”

“Let me speak a little louder so you can understand.” Andrew's roommate says. “Go. Fuck. Yourself.”

Because the therapist has a fuse as long as his inseam, Andrew’s roommate is escorted out of the session just the way he came in, plus an official warning. Three warnings and he’ll be in lock-up for a day. He looks more sullen than worried.

The session is particularly irritating today because of the therapist’s bad mood. Andrew responds to this childishness by refusing to talk and nearly earns a warning of his own. He’s saved when the boy to the other side of him accidentally drops his pack of cigarettes (which they’re not supposed to have) and the therapist starts chewing him out for it. Then the bell sounds, and they’re free to go.

His roommate is there when he goes back to his cell, sitting cross-legged on his bed. He looks up as Andrew enters but doesn’t say anything. Andrew ignores him and plucks a book off the shelf above his desk. The latest copy of _Foreign Affairs._ It has a segment on the European economy he wants to read.

“That therapist is a jackass.” his roommate pipes up. Andrew flicks his eyes up from his book, meets his roommate’s for a moment, then pointedly goes back to reading. His roommate gets the hint and says nothing more.

\--

He gets called into the warden’s office six months into his stay at Greenhall, the day after he’d dumped his dinner tray on somebody and then punched them in the face. Not his best work, he’ll admit - had he done it the other way around, he wouldn’t have gotten gravy all over his hand. But the satisfaction of a nose crunching under his fist is enough to offset that.

“Mr. Doe.” she says, when she notices him standing in her doorway. “Sit.”

He does. She has the most comfortable chairs of any office in Greenhall. Perks of being the ‘principal’, he guesses. She looks the same as ever - hair cut ruthlessly short, showing off her round face, dressed drably in a dark blue sweater over black slacks. She has a body like a linebacker, and he’s seen her use it as such when one of the boys thought he could intimidate her by getting in her face.

“Let’s cut to the chase. Overall, my staff describes you as a little rude, but not particularly hard to manage.” Andrew’s mouth curls unpleasantly at that particular wording. The warden notices, and does not care. “You’ve had exactly two serious incidents since coming here, far below the average, and both have been a week before you go up for consideration for early release. Is that a coincidence, or a pattern?”

Greenhall, as undermanaged as it is, regularly puts its ‘students’ up for early release if they’ve managed to keep their heads down and their hands to themselves. That’s a staggeringly small portion of the population to begin with, and it doesn’t take much to get your name off the list. Thus.

“I’m enjoying my time here. The education I was getting before was sub-par.” Andrew answers, as flippantly as he can manage. A particularly pointed joke - if Greenhall were ranked against other Californian schools for quality of education, it would likely be dead last. Andrew’s time in class regularly makes him want to drink bleach.

“I see.” she checks some papers on her desk, makes a considering sound. “Well then I’m sure it’ll disappoint you to hear that your latest consideration came back rejected. You’ll be here another few months, at least. In the meantime, due to good behavior - or, should I say, lack of particularly _bad_ behavior-” she gives him a wry look, “you’re eligible for a new program we’re starting. Have you heard of Exy?”

“You want me to join a sports team?” Andrew says flatly, disbelievingly. The warden shrugs and hands him a flyer.

“We got money from the state to set up a court. You spend a lot of time in the gym and running during rec period. Might be worth your time.”

She dismisses him, letting him keep the flyer to look over. There’s a couple matching flyers posted up on bulletin boards around the hall, with space underneath for sign-ups.

Mendez is a matter-of-fact woman. She comes to do her job, and while she’s always putting offers on the table, she’s not interested in holding anybody’s hand. _You make your own choices,_ she’d said to the group of kids at his orientation. _You want to make good ones, we’ll give you that chance. You want to keep screwing up and ruin your own shot at a good future, that’s fine too. We’ll accommodate you either way._

Maybe it’s that lack of pressure from her that makes him write his name down. It’s certainly not true interest on his part, because he’d stopped being interested in things a while ago. But he needs something to take up his time here, since he’s in for the long haul, and Exy might be a good distraction.

\--

“So what’s your damage, anyway?” his roommate asks him one night, several weeks after showing up. They’ve only just started to settle into a routine. Both of them by unspoken agreement go to bed at the same time, 30 minutes or so after lights out, and then spent half the night staring at the ceiling, waiting for the other to fall asleep first. His roommate is always awake before him in the mornings, but he’s snappish and angry to Andrew’s dull morning haze. It’s worked so far. Still, they haven’t talked much.

“I murdered someone. Chopped him into little bitty pieces.” Andrew says flatly. What the fuck does he expect?

“Great. You're a fucking asshole too.” his roommate mutters into the darkness. There’s silence for a few moments. Andrew waits with the infinite patience of the bored to find out what comes next.

“How’s the Exy team?”

That isn’t what Andrew had expected. It takes him a minute to recalibrate and digest the question. Another few to determine how much he cares about answering.

“It’s like trying to teach physics to a pack of chimpanzees.” he says finally. His roommate huffs amusedly in response. A sense of humor, then. Hopefully not too much of one. That would be tiring.

“Juan says you’re pretty good. You played before?”

Andrew does not remember which one 'Juan' is. The dealer? One of the strikers? Maybe there's more than one Juan. 

“Playing goalie for stick ball is exactly like playing goalie for soccer, only with a stick and more hitting.”

“Yeah, Juan says you enjoy the full-contact part of the game.”

Andrew had been cycled through all the positions before it was determined that he should be put in goal, where he could do the least damage. It’s not his fault that the other players come close enough for body checks. And really, they should be checking potential players for proper bone density before putting them on the field. Andrew’s not at fault for that broken wrist OR the cracked collarbone. Mendez knew what she was doing when she offered him the spot.

It takes twenty minutes of silence before Andrew realizes his roommate has fallen asleep.

\--

Months pass. Andrew wakes, drifts through classes, stands in front of the painted rectangle that counts as the goal for their little bastard half court and bats balls away from himself. It had been vaguely interesting at the start - a ball flying towards him at fifty miles an hour, only a stick with a net on the end to defend himself - but then he learns to block the ball, send it rocketing towards the other end of the court, and it becomes boring again. By that time, they’ve gotten half-hearted support to take trips to the local community center, and that’s enough to keep him in the goal a little longer.

It helps that his roommate knows a kid on one of the local teams, and a passed note between them means that he always has a couple packs of cigarettes ready to slip to Andrew. They’re searched when they’re taken back into Greenhall, of course, but the guards are too stupid to check the nooks and crannies of the racquet boxes. Andrew shares the cigarettes with his roommate.

Before one of their game, the friend suggests casually that he might like some payment for the cigarettes. Andrew, halfway through the first cigarette of a new pack, considers giving him a black eye, then looks up and realizes the boy’s eyes are watching Andrew’s mouth as he wraps them around the cigarette filter. Half a minute later, Andrew has his hand shoved down the boy’s shorts, jerking him fast and hard as the boy occupies his hands smoking Andrew’s cigarette. Afterwards, he doesn’t offer to touch Andrew, and Andrew doesn’t ask. They do it a few more times at other games, and Andrew replicates his success with a few other boys at Greenhall until he’s managed to trace the jagged edges of his limits, what he can handle and what makes his vision go black and hard around the edges.

His roommate never truly adjusts to being in Greenhall. He wears his anger like a suit of armour around himself, but he doesn’t understand that doing so just invites more attacks. Andrew watches him clench his fists, and take deep breaths, and channel his emotion into short, biting insults. He tries, but he can’t walk away, so he hits boiling point every time.

He tells Andrew eventually that it was his temper that had landed him in Greenhall; his earth sciences teacher had pushed his buttons until he’d snapped and hit him in the temple with his textbook.

They took it, unfortunately,” he tells Andrew, with a disappointed frown. “Would’ve been a nice souvenir.”

He asks Andrew a few more times what he’s in for. Andrew amuses himself by making up stories, but when that becomes boring, he finally admits to B&E and tells his roommate to stop asking if he enjoys having front teeth. For a kid with a temper, his roommate takes that surprisingly well, and they get along. For the most part.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to everybody leaving kudos and comments! You guys are really fantastic, and seeing that email in my inbox makes my day every time :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slight delay, I wanted to spend some extra time editing this chapter. I'm not sure if I'm totally happy with it yet, but it's certainly better than it was. A quick extra warning for content in this one, involving Andrew's 'misunderstanding' of Drake's actions, and some separate homophobic slurs.

Weekends are visiting time for friends and family. Andrew, because his last name is Doe, has visiting hours on Saturdays. It’s been a while since Cass tried, though she doesn’t seem keen on giving up just yet even though he never takes her visits. Higgins came once and made awkward small talk for fifteen minutes before excusing himself. That’s the full extent of his visits. 

This Saturday, he hears his name over the intercom as he’s pushing the soggy cheerios in his bowl around, unwilling to eat them without any sugar packets to add in. He absently considers not going, but his roommate is at his extra therapy session and he has nothing better to do. He might as well go inform the guard that they can tell Cass to fuck off.  Andrew dumps his bowl of cheerios in the trash and heads to the visitor center. 

When he checks in with the guard handling the visits, he gets a surprise. Andrew doesn’t particularly like surprises. 

“No, it’s not her this time. It’s…” the guard looks down, tracing the names on the sign-in sheet until she finds where his has been written down. “Luther Hemmick?” 

Andrew doesn’t know that name. He doesn’t like the sound of it, though. Something about it screams pretentiousness. 

“You gonna take this one, for once?” the guard asks him. He’s not the only one that refuses visits, but most of the kids here take them if they have the chance. Plenty of others, like Alton, get nobody at all. Andrew mulls it over. The spark of interest is stronger than his apathy today. He nods. 

Since Greenhall is a juvenile facility, the visits are fairly relaxed - they get to meet in person, with only a bit of oversight and the occasional pat-down afterwards. There’s a large room with tables in it for people to sit at while they visit. A row of vending machines lines one wall, along with a table with shitty coffee and styrofoam cups. In the opposite corner, a shelf with a selection of faded board games stands. Visiting hours are from 9 - 1, and it’s just now 9:30, so the room is only half full. The air conditioning must be broken, because the room is hot, enough that Andrew feels a trickle of sweat curl down his spine under his hoodie. 

Andrew scans the room when he’s released into it, looking for the most likely culprit, and picks him out quickly, because the man is already walking towards him. Luther is a middle-aged man with gaunt features and a neatly trimmed beard just starting to go grey. He’s dressed in a white button-down and grey trousers, starched and stiff. A cross glints around his neck. His eyes are dark as they settle on Andrew, severe. He looks like someone that spends a lot of time kneeling at altars during church, and judging other people afterwards.

“Thank you for meeting with me, Andrew. I’m Luther Hemmick.” Luther offers his hand, which Andrew looks at, but doesn’t take. Luther tries for longer than most, and Andrew finally breaks the face-off by turning on his heel and striding to an empty table. 

A silence falls between them as Luther sits, clearly struggling to find the right words, and Andrew passively watches him struggle with absolutely no intent to help. He’s just about decided to get up and walk back out of the visitor’s area when Luther finally speaks. 

“I’ve been told you know you have a twin brother?” it is phrased as a question, but Andrew knows Luther knows the answer, so he doesn’t reply. “I’m Aaron’s uncle. And yours, I suppose. Your biological mother is my sister.” 

Silence lapses again. Luther seems to expect Andrew to react to that somehow. Andrew examines his fingernails and says, “What a joyous family reunion this is. I’m moved.” 

A crease appears between Luther’s brows as he frowns, but he doesn’t let Andrew rile him. “I came to see if you’ve changed your mind about meeting Aaron. I’m aware my sister has not been…” here Luther stumbles a bit, “...approachable, but Aaron truly wants to form a relationship. I told him I would ask you.” 

“If my dear brother is so infatuated with meeting his long-lost sibling, then why, pray tell, is he not here in front of me himself?” Andrew asks him, meeting his eyes again. “Perhaps the hour-long drive is too much effort to put in unless he knows I’ll fall to his feet in gratitude for gracing me with his presence? Hmm?” 

“Aaron and Tilda no longer live in California.” Luther tells him. This is news to Andrew.  “They moved several months ago. To Columbia, in South Carolina. But if you’re willing to meet with Aaron, he would fly out. Perhaps he could stay with your foster family for a time, get to know them. They seem to be important to you. Cass told me she’d been planning on adopting you before you came here. If that’s still an option, and I can do anything to help - ” 

Luther is still talking, and Andrew is taking in every word, but his focus is stopped on one sentence.  _ Perhaps he could stay with your foster family for a time.  _ Though Andrew knows objectively that the bottom cannot have actually dropped out of his stomach, it doesn’t stop the nausea from swarming up and tightening his throat. The hot air turns his head cloudy. In a subconscious way, he appreciates the reminder that the world could be something other than flat and grey; in reality, it takes all he has not to wrap his hands around Luther’s neck. 

He splits the difference by standing up abruptly and circling the table, leaning in until his face is just inches away from Luther’s. Luther is tall enough that they’re nearly the same height with Luther sitting and Andrew standing, but Andrew knows exactly how close to get to make the height difference cease to matter. 

Softly, he tells Luther, “If my brother so much as steps foot in that house, I will find you, and I will kill you.” Luther, transfixed, stares up at him. 

“Back it up, Doe!” Andrew hears a guard call behind him. Andrew returns to his seat. His point has been made. 

“I was - “ Luther stops, swallows, finds a less shaky tone for his voice. “I was under the impression that you got along with your foster family. At some point, at least. Did something happen?” 

Andrew had thought that by coming here, the danger was over. With Cass and her family out of the picture, there was no connection between his brother and the Spear family, no reason to meet. Now, here is this man in front of him, bringing them together again. Proposing to bring his brother, his  _ twin,  _ right into the situation that Andrew had given everything to keep him out of. 

If Andrew believed in a higher power, he’d be wondering what he’d done to deserve this. But at fourteen he already knows the truth: there’s no rhyme or reason to why bad things happen, other than that the world is filled with bad people. 

“Let me give you a secret, Luther.” Andrew says carefully. “Are you listening? This is very important, so I need you to hear what I’m saying.” 

He feels how the words want to stick his chest and close his throat up, but his voice is still, unwavering. He has years of experience at this. He has never said these words before, not out loud, but it doesn’t matter, because the only thing that matters is that Aaron Minyard and Drake Spear are never so much as in the same city, let alone the same house. 

His vision is warping again. Andrew ignores it. 

He wants to say it simply, directly, but it won’t come out. Andrew has to talk around it in a careful circle, letting each word settle in his mouth so he can know if it will voice itself. It feels like a failure on his part, his inability to say it aloud. But now is not the the time to reflect on that. Now is the time to make Luther understand.

“In certain families, there are games that teenage boys play with their foster brothers, games that involve dark rooms and empty houses and bruises. Do you understand what I’m saying?

“Imagine a thirteen year old boy, Luther. Imagine him trapped and helpless under somebody that is supposed to love him like a brother. Is that what you want for Aaron? Because that’s what’s waiting for him in that house.”

Luther’s eyes are wide and unblinking. He looks jolted, uncertain. Andrew needs to say more, to really drive the point home, but suddenly there’s a mass in his throat that he can’t swallow down, no matter how hard he tries. The heat of the room has his head spinning, and he feels his focus loosening from his body, ready to drift away like a balloon in the breeze. Reflexively, his hand creeps to his other arm and pushes the sleeve up so he can drive his nails into the scars there. They’ve all long since healed, but the gesture snaps his focus back squarely into his head. 

He looks at Luther. 

Luther is looking down at his arm. 

Andrew follows his gaze, and sees the neat crosshatches across his skin on display, the red half-moons left by his nails a stark contrast to the silver-white. Nobody is supposed to see them but Andrew.  _ Nobody is supposed to see them.  _

Luther’s hand, as reflexively as Andrew’s, goes to the cross around his neck as Andrew drags his sleeves down, all the way over his hands. Andrew can’t look at his face. He knows what he’ll see there. Nobody is supposed to see them, because they don’t understand what they mean. They see Andrew’s scars and think  _ weak,  _ when Andrew only ever did it to keep himself strong. 

“You clearly have… a lot to work through, Andrew.” Luther says softly. “I can imagine that growing up without a real family is very difficult. It’s natural to struggle in trying to understand what normal brotherly affection is like. I’ve met Drake, and he’s an upstanding, godly young man. Don’t throw away this chance to have something real over a misunderstanding.”

Something inside Andrew cracks. 

The minutes of silence after that fester between them like a rotten wound. Luther looks at him, thumbing his cross. Andrew searches for the blankness inside himself he’d had just this morning. He needs it to drape over poison that’s snaking through his veins. Looking down at his hands, he realizes they’re trembling, and no amount of willpower can make them stop. 

“A misunderstanding.” Bizarrely, Andrew wants to laugh. He doesn’t. He has to fix this, somehow. 

“Let me make you a deal, Luther. You don’t bring Aaron into that house, or anywhere near the Spear family, and I won’t slit your throat ear to ear and shove your cross down your esophagus.” 

Andrew makes himself look up, but he focuses his eyes on the point between Luther’s eyebrows. The smile he dredges up from the rottenness inside him smears across his face. Seeing it, The pallid colour that tints Luther’s skin makes him look even more gaunt and corpse-like.

“If you can manage that, I’ll do you one better. Tell Cass and Richard that they are not to have any more foster children in that house. Not for a single night. You do that, and I’ll give Aaron a half-hour of my time. Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.” 

Andrew doesn’t bother waiting for a response, because Luther is in no position to give one. Instead he walks, dream-like, out of the visiting area and back to his cell, where he lays down on his bed. Some ghostly sound tickles his ears, persistent and endless. 

If he closes his eyes, it sounds a lot like screaming. 

\--

“Add a 25.” 

Obligingly, Alton pulls a green weighted plate from the floor and slides it onto the end of the barbell, snugging it up next to the 45 pound plate already there. Andrew does the same on the other side, then drops down onto the bench with a thump and pulls himself into position below the bar. Alton counts his reps for him as he brings the bar to his sternum and presses it back into position. 

“Who let a faggot into the gym?” somebody calls to Andrew’s right. Andrew pauses halfway through a rep, then reracks the bar and sits up. 

“Bet your mouth gets a better workout than your chest, all that dick-sucking you do.” George Campbell says with a nasty grin from the bench over. At seventeen, Campbell is pimple-faced and repugnant, sporting a hackjob haircut that hangs crookedly above his ears. He’s made a few remarks to other boys when Andrew’s walked past him before, mostly at meal times, but Andrew has never cared enough to stop it. It would be like acknowledging the buzzing of a fly in his ear. 

“How much weight do you want?” he asks Alton. Alton, who is shooting Campbell a dirty look, looks back at him in surprise, then furrows his eyebrows. 

“Fuck, I don’t know. 135, I guess.” 

Together they change the weight out and Alton gets down on the bench to do his set. His shoulders are tense as he unracks the bar, and Andrew can see how he struggles to focus. Campbell is nattering on.  _ Bzzt bzzt bzzt.  _ Alton racks the bar with increased irritation and turns to Campbell. 

“Who the fuck asked you, anyway? Why don’t you shut the hell up and mind your own damn business, huh?” Alton sneers at him, one hand white-knuckling the side of the bench. Andrew wants to drag his attention back to their workout so they’re done in time for dinner, but when Alton gets worked up he swings at anybody in the vicinity. Andrew doesn’t want to have to put him down unless he has to. Better that Alton just didn’t let bothersome people get to him, but that’s like asking the sun not to shine. 

“You’re pretty defensive about him, pretty boy. You his bitch? That what you two get up to in your room at night?” Campbell shoots back. It looks stupid on his face, with his big elephant ears and an angry red pimple right in the middle of his forehead. Alton stands up off the bench, so Andrew takes his spot and does his next set. 

“Hey, fuck you, you snaggle-toothed piece of shit. Does talking shit make you feel better about the fact that you’ve never even touched a girl?” Alton’s hands have curled up into fists, the set of his shoulders creeping up towards his ears.

For whatever stupid reason, this angry little fly bothers Alton noticeably. Andrew doesn’t like it when Alton is bothered. Ever since Luther Hemmick had come calling, the once-even greyness of Andrew’s world has been too sharp, as if somebody had turned the saturation up far too high, and he has no patience left for other irritations. He racks the bar and stands up off the bench, stalking over to where Campbell is standing. 

Before anyone can move, Andrew grabs Campbell by the front of his jumpsuit and swings him around until he trips over the bench and collapses onto it, cursing.  In one swift movement, Andrew flings a leg over Campbell’s chest and unracks the barbell above his head. The press of the chilly metal across his throat cuts Campbell’s cursing off. Campbell has always liked to load more weight on the bar than he can handle; with Andrew’s feet hooked under the bench and his hands pressing lightly down, neither he nor the barbell move, no matter how hard Campbell struggles. 

“Over one hundred people die in America each year from gym-related accidents.” Andrew recites in a bored voice. He’d read that in a magazine a few weeks ago while waiting on a therapy appointment. “If you bench press by yourself without a spotter, it’s very easy to drop the weight on your neck and die of suffocation. Especially if you do it in the one corner of the gym the cameras can’t see.” 

Campbell’s eyes dart around, assessing the truth of this statemen. His struggling grows more frantic. Andrew presses down harder on the length of metal until Campbell’s eyes go glassy and his movements slow. Then, just as swiftly as he’d descended, he reracks the barbell and gets up. 

“There’s a lot of ways that accidents can happen to someone. I’d be careful if I were you.” 

His timing may have been off on that - Campbell takes so long to move that Andrew nearly thinks he’s passed out. But eventually, Campbell rolls off the bench and onto the floor, coughing, then scrambles for the entrance to the gym, nearly falling headfirst into a cable machine. When the door slams shut behind him, there is silence. 

“I don’t need your fucking protection.” Alton says finally. His tone is venomous, but only truly dangerous if Andrew chooses to put himself in striking range. 

Andrew ignores Alton’s stare and goes back to loading the bar. He slides more plates onto each side, lays down on the bench, and unracks the bar. Fluidly, he brings it to his chest eight times, focusing carefully on his breathing so it keeps in time with the repetitions. 225 pounds, to Andrew’s 130 pound, 15 year old self, is enough for him to strain through the last few reps. 

Then he gets up, ignoring Alton’s eyes on him, and walks out of the gym. 

\--

There are times when Andrew is present enough to be honest with himself. Most of these happen in the space between one moment and the next as he’s watching a ball come flying at him from a striker’s racquet. Something settles in him when he blocks a shot and feels that jarring pain in his arms. He’s been so used to walking around with whatever it is popped out of place, like a phantom dislocated shoulder, that it almost feels more wrong to have all the parts of him in the right spot. 

(The feeling gets stronger the first time he ricochets a blocked shot off a striker’s helmet. That’s why he keeps doing it.) 

It’s not that he  _ enjoys  _ Exy. He remembers what enjoying things is like. He can’t forget it, actually, though he wants to most days. But Exy is the closest he gets to enjoyment, and that makes it worth something. Andrew has never really wanted to kill himself, but Exy is the only thing that makes him look down at the cross-hatches on his arms and feel relief that he never made them deeper. 

\--

“So, are you really, uh…?” Alton starts one night as they’re both staring at the ceiling, not even pretending to sleep. Andrew’s feeling vaguely irritated that he didn’t get to finish the chapter of his book on conflict in the Middle East before lights out. Alton had gotten into an altercation in class today and been dragged in front of Mendez again - the third time this month. He’s been twitching ever since, hands and eyes restless in a way that makes Andrew want to punch him. 

“Am I…?” Andrew prompts, after a moment. He’s not really sure why he bothers. He doesn’t much care to know what Alton is going to ask. 

“You know. What Campbell said. You a queer?”

Part of Alton’s problem is that he’s never been taught to speak properly. He genuinely doesn’t understand why people get offended when he uses an offensive word. Andrew - who’s been called far worse things than  _ queer -  _ doesn’t really give a shit. Maybe that’s why they work. 

“Don’t ask stupid questions.” Andrew says, after a moment’s silence. The truth is, if he’s being honest, he still doesn’t have it totally figured out for himself either. He can handle the physical part most times, but the rest of it is still a mystery. 

Silence settles over them like a blanket. Andrew feels the weight of eyes on him, and looks over to see Alton studying him in the dim light cast through the cell door. Alton meets his eyes for a split second and looks away and back up at the ceiling. 

“I… I ain’t never…” he says haltingly. A glimpse of movement at the corner of Andrew’s eye is him clenching and unclenching his fist at his side. Alton’s been told by countless counselors and therapists that he needs to learn how to vocalize what he’s feeling more often, instead of lashing out. Watching him attempt it is a painful process, like the words have to be ripped from his throat. 

Andrew waits. 

“Maybe… me too. I don’t know.” he grits out finally. That seems to be as much as he can say about it. It seems to be more than he wanted to, judging from the harsh breath he takes afterwards. 

Andrew looks up at the dirty ceiling and contemplates himself calmly. Today is a good day. He swings his legs over the side of his bed and walks over to Alton’s side of the room. 

“Put your hands over your head.” Andrew says simply. The way that Alton does it unquestioningly gives him the same sense of  _ settling  _ that Exy does. Andrew swings a leg over Alton’s torso on the bed and settles above him. Even raised up on his knees, there’s more of him touching Alton than Andrew would like. But the startled look in Alton’s eyes, and the way he sucks in a breath and holds it, makes it a bit more bearable. 

“Touch me and I stop.” Andrew warns him. Two birds, one stone: if Alton can’t follow a rule, Andrew knows not to bother with him and goes back to bed. If Alton has a Big Gay Crisis in the middle of this, he can push Andrew off and they’ll pretend it never happened. But Alton just nods and curses under his breath. 

Andrew’s never kissed any of the boys he’s fooled around with. He’s up to five now, one of which couldn’t keep his hands to himself and got a split lip for his efforts. The rest had been okay with Andrew’s quick, business-like fumbles, and never pushed for more than that. But Andrew wants to push his limits today, to see how far they’ll stretch, so he leans down and presses his mouth to Alton’s. Alton’s lips are chapped and rough, tingly from the mint gum he hoards and Andrew hates. 

The first few moments are supremely boring. Then Alton’s lips part below his, and things get a lot more interesting. 

It’s messy. They knock noses several times as they figure out the best angles. Andrew traces the gap in Alton’s teeth where he’s missing a canine. Alton bites at Andrew’s lower lip hard enough that Andrew nearly decks him. But as they struggle through it together, it gets easier, until they’re both gasping for air and Alton is struggling to keep himself still under Andrew, who’s fighting his own urges to rock his hips down and seek relief. 

They part finally and stare at each other for a moment. Alton’s hands shift where they’re bunched in the blanket. 

“Shit. I’m queer as fuck.” he says, with a note of wonder in his voice. 

_ Settling.  _

Andrew makes a noise of annoyance and retreats to his own bed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to chat about this last chapter, but totally forgot. Nicky says at some point in the series that Andrew's time at juvie is something he doesn't dare ask about, and there's very little information on it available anywhere else in the series. That means a lot of what I'm describing is totally made up, with no basis in canon (moreso than previous chapters). I chose to interpret the absence of information as meaning that something very important happened to Andrew while in juvie, and I'm trying my best to represent that, so I'm particularly interested in your thoughts during this arc of Andrew's life and whether they feel real and impactful. And of course, I love concrit, so please let me know if there are things you DON'T like, or where I can improve!


	8. Chapter 8

Against Andrew’s better judgement, it becomes a routine. After lights out, between patrols by bored security guards, Alton stretches out across his bed and lets Andrew shake him apart piece by piece. 

Something about it is different from Andrew’s previous experiences. He finds his eyes drifting up from the placement of his hands to sweep across Alton’s face, the dark flush across his cheeks and the long line of his throat as he throws his head back. Andrew’s fingers sometimes press forward of their own volition and trace a jutting hip bone. 

Alton weathers the storm that Andrew brings with good grace, and never tries to touch him back. But he does occasionally refuse Andrew’s tug at his waistband in favour of trading lazy kisses instead. The kind that leave Andrew’s lips swollen and tender, and stir up warm tightness in his belly. It’s a different kind of tightness than arousal, and it’s not, it  _ can’t  _ be, because Andrew doesn’t have the capability for anything else. It’s just his body misinterpreting things. 

He gets the same feeling, though, when Alton smiles. 

\--

“Can I ask you something?” Alton asks one night. His voice is soft and slow. Lights had gone out a few hours ago, but they’d filled up the extra time easily, neither of them interested in sleep. Now Andrew is back in his own bed, itching for a cigarette, or maybe a candy bar. 

“You can do anything you want.” Andrew replies. His voice is rough from their previous activities. Alton is the first person Andrew’s put his mouth on, and he finds it… less distasteful than he’d expected. Andrew knows about himself that he prefers things that leave marks - the taste of nicotine after a cigarette, the sugar high of sweets, the faint raised lines on his arms. That had left a different kind of mark, a sore throat that makes itself known every time he swallows.

“Did you try to kill yourself? Is that why your arms are all fucked up?” 

Well. 

Andrew doesn’t like this question, namely because his scars are not a fucking topic of conversation. People shouldn’t know about them. But they live in a small space, and Alton is a busybody, and Andrew’s brain flashes back to his large, scarred hands twisted up in his blanket, jerking and twitching but staying put no matter what Andrew does. 

Still, the question is so ridiculous, Andrew nearly laughs in his face. Anybody with the slightest bit of knowledge about self-harm should know that if you want to kill yourself,  _ this  _ isn’t how you do it. 

“Do I look that incapable to you?” Andrew asks harshly. “If I’d wanted to kill myself, you’d have a different roommate.” 

“Well, sorry.” is Alton’s response. Andrew can imagine the face he’s making at Andrew’s harsh words. He always scrunches his nose up like he’s smelled something horrible, and his brows draw together. Andrew’s seen the expression enough to have it ingrained on the back of his eyelids. 

The room goes silent again. Andrew is just thinking that Alton’s fallen asleep when his quiet voice floats through the air again. 

“My older sister did.” Alton pauses for a moment, then keeps going. “My dad would beat the shit out of her, most nights. Never touched me, but if Julia did anything wrong - got a B in a class, or missed curfew, or got caught smoking weed - he’d lay into her for it until she said she was sorry. Only thing was, she started thinking she didn’t need to say sorry, and then he’d just keep fucking beating her. He went after her with a belt one time and nearly took her eye out. Then I came home one day and…” 

The silence stretches on for a good ten minutes. Andrew lays on his bed and stares at the ceiling impassively as Alton takes in shaky breath after shaky breath, and finally lets out a few quiet sobs. 

“I came home, and I was looking for her to get my stupid CD player back, and she was in the bathtub. Dead. She was just a year away from graduating and getting the hell out, but she couldn’t make it.” 

The sobs are louder this time. Andrew gets up, slowly, and walks over to Alton’s bed. When he sits and holds his hand out, Alton stares at it for a moment before hesitantly grabbing it. Andrew sits, motionless, as Alton lets out another few sobs and tightens his grip, until Andrew’s hand is pulsing with pain. Andrew looks away and across the room to afford Alton his privacy as he mourns. 

“I’m just like him.” Alton says, between chest-heaving breaths. “I’m just like my old man. I’ve got his temper and his fists, and that’s why I’m here.” 

What a stupid thing to say. 

Andrew tightens his grip on Alton’s hand and yanks on his arm to get his attention. “God doesn’t like liars. Your father beat a helpless girl he was supposed to protect. You’ve never done anything like that in your life.” 

Miracle of miracles, the crying stops as Alton looks at him incredulously. The surprised looks melts slowly into a scowl, until Alton pulls his hand from Andrew’s and sits up. 

“Don’t act like you know my fucking life story, because you don’t.” Alton says lowly. Andrew gives him an unimpressed look. Lashing out in self defense. How creative. 

“I didn’t claim to.” Andrew responds. “But I know  _ you _ . And you don’t have an anger problem, do you? You do everything you can to stop a situation before it starts, but people take your words wrong and get mad, and then you get mad because you can’t do anything else. People attack you, and put you down, and then when they get what’s coming to them, they cry about it and point fingers at you. They may not throw the first punch, but they always start the fight, don’t they?” 

Alton stills. 

Andrew sees the war in Alton’s eyes. He sees what it means to Alton to be truly  _ seen,  _ and not just looked at. He sees how the lines of thought that have been seared in Alton’s brain by the people he’s met collide with the idea that maybe,  _ maybe,  _ he deserves more than he’s ever been given. 

Andrew remembers what it was like, to sit alone in a room and think that every bad thing that’s ever happened was his fault. That if he’d just done this, or said that, maybe things would have turned out different. But then the world kept pushing no matter  _ what  _ he did, and ironically, it was tipping over the edge that made him realize the truth. Nothing he’d ever done could make him deserve what happened to him. Even Andrew’s shriveled black heart can accept that Alton deserves this knowledge too. 

Alton curls his hand into a fist and slams it into the concrete at his side. His dark eyes seem to flash in the gloom with the intensity of what he’s feeling. Andrew remembers what that was like, too, and doesn’t miss it. 

“I’m going to bed.” Alton says, voice gritty. Unprotesting, Andrew gets up and returns to his bed. He falls asleep to the sound of Alton’s harsh, gritted breaths, and dreams of guilt and shame. 

\--

There are kisses, and there are fights. 

There are nights that Andrew hums inside at the way Alton looks at him. There are nights where Andrew feels too empty to even speak, and Alton might as well be invisible for all Andrew notices him. There are nights where Alton shivers with anger, hand pressed against a black eye or a split lip. There are nights where they are both strung as tight as piano wires, and Andrew scrapes his teeth over Alton, who is dripping blood from split knuckles all over his sheets. 

It isn’t enough. It’s too much. It’s fucked up, and worst of all, it floats through Andrew’s head at inopportune moments as something that might, one day, be  _ more.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's so short D: 
> 
> I'm not SUPER active on Tumblr, but I wanted to let you guys know that if you want to message me or anything, you can find me @s0ym1lk. Thanks as always for reading!


	9. Chapter 9

Things get better, but then they get worse. 

Andrew is at a community Exy game when Alton loses it and punches a guard, breaking his nose. It takes two more guards to pull them apart and three to drag Alton down the hall and into a temporary holding cell. 

Andrew doesn’t hear about this right away. Instead, he returns to their shared room to find Alton’s side stripped bare. No stupid comics from the Sunday papers on the wall. No dirty socks or spare shirts laying across the bed. The plain grey worry stone that he’d worn a groove into with his thumb is no longer under his pillow. Every trace of him, gone. 

Andrew goes to the warden’s office. 

“Let me see Fredericks.” he demands as soon as he steps a foot inside. Mendez looks up from her paperwork, round face hard as ice, and studies him carefully. She’s gotten her hair cut especially short, giving her a sharper outline than usual. 

“This is a low-security facility, Doe, and that was his third fight this week. The state won’t let me have a kid with that level of violence at Greenhall. At this point, there’s nothing I can do about it.” 

Mendez is many things, but she is not a liar. Andrew sees in her face that this is the truth. Though she hadn’t necessarily liked Alton, there was something in her eyes when she looked at him during group announcements or when she’d drop by the rec areas and cafeteria to observe. Recognition, maybe. Andrew gets the feeling that Mendez is far closer in nature and history to the rejects she oversees than she would have them believe. 

“He’s still here. Let me see him.” Andrew insists again. Obligingly, Mendez picks up the walkie talkie on the side of her desk and presses the ‘talk’ button on the top.

“DeFusco. Come to my office and escort Andrew Doe to one of the private meeting rooms, then get somebody else and bring Alton Fredericks down too. Give them twenty minutes to talk.” 

She puts the walkie talkie down and fixes Andrew with a hard look. “No funny stuff. I mean it.” 

Satisfied, Andrew turns and leaves. Mendez doesn’t expect a thank you, especially not from him. 

He’s taken to one of the ‘meeting’ rooms, which is less for meeting and more for interrogations if one of the Greenhall residents is ever implicated in a criminal case. The room is bare-walled and absent of anything but a steel-topped table and two chairs, all bolted to the floor. The table is cold against his arms, even through his hoodie, so Andrew leans back in his chair and waits. 

Not a few minutes later, Alton is escorted in in handcuffs by two sour-faced guards. His lip is split and crusty with blood; the smudges under his eyes make them look black and deathly. When his gaze settles on Andrew, the dullness of it sends a shiver up Andrew’s back. 

“You’re a fucking moron.” Andrew starts with, once the guards have uncuffed him and left the room. “What happened?” 

Alton slumps into the other seat like a marionette with broken strings. Lolling listlessly in the chair, it seems impossible that he could be capable of having anger issues. The sight is frightening unfamiliar to Andrew, just as unfamiliar as the dull look in his eyes. Alton has never hung his head like that, never stared at the floor as if not even seeing it. He may have been a broken thing since the day Andrew had met him, but he’s never looked like one. Not until now. 

“What do you think happened.” Alton says woodenly. “Henderson made me mad, so I punched him. They’re transferring me to Orange County tomorrow.” 

Andrew’s hands tighten into fists at his sides. He wants to pick Alton up by the neck and slam him against the wall. He doesn’t. 

“I can’t protect you if you’re not here.” he says instead, lowly. The words are strange on his tongue, but he recognizes them as true. Somewhere between Alton’s arrival and now, he’d become a centerpoint in Andrew’s life in a way Andrew never thought anyone would become again. Andrew has very little to offer to another person, not much more than biting words and a few quiet moments together here and there, but somewhere along the line he’d come to wan- 

-he’d come to  _ expect  _ that Alton would be there. Laughing at stupid jokes in the Calvin and Hobbes comics. Ranting about the shitty food at Greenhall. Gasping and angry and  _ alive  _ underneath Andrew’s hands, shaking apart one kiss at a time. 

“You can’t  _ protect me  _ anyway, Andrew.” Alton responds. He looks up at Andrew, and his face is devoid of emotion. “You can’t psychoanalyze me into being better, you can’t save me from myself. There’s only one answer to this, and it’s not you. So quite wasting your time.” 

The dullness in Alton’s eyes reveals itself for what it really is: truth. Something inside of Alton has gone empty, and there’s nothing left in Andrew that can fill it. He’s too little, too late. 

The inside of Andrew is hot with anger, but his body shivers, almost uncontrollably. The brightness of the room, the single uncovered bulb in the light fixture above, hurts his eyes and makes him squint against the light. He feels both like he’s dreaming and like he’s gone two days without so much as closing his eyes. 

Andrew stays in his chair and stares at the ceiling. These are likely the last moments he’ll ever have with Alton Fredericks. The broken boy across from him returns to his slumped forward posture, eyes drilling a hole into the table. 

Andrew sees, from the corner of his eye, when Mendez appears at the window alongside the guard. At eighteen minutes, she raises her hand and points to her watch. Andrew doesn’t acknowledge her, but he does get up and move around to the other side of the table. His skin is cool against Andrew’s fingers as Andrew tilts his face up towards his own. Alton accepts the press of Andrew’s lips to his, but it feels like kissing a corpse. 

Mendez opens the door, and Andrew leaves. The next morning, he watches his roommate get escorted out the front of Greenhall and shoved into the back of a cop car. 

Alton goes. Andrew stays. 

\--

He sees an article in the paper one day about a suicide at Orange County Detention Center, but he doesn’t bother to read it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, to the commenter who told me they liked Alton and hoped nothing bad would happen to him... sorry. 
> 
> It's been interesting to write in this style, which is much shorter and starker than my normal writing style. It puts extra pressure on me to pick just the right words and the right things to say. Hopefully it's working out.


	10. Chapter 10

The fourth Saturday after Luther’s visit to Greenhall, Andrew’s name is announced again for visiting hours. He slaps his tray down on top of Campbell’s, who glares at him but says nothing about it, and makes his way to the visitor’s area. 

“Didn’t know you had a look-alike.” the guard says cheerily as Andrew walks up. Andrew looks past him carefully into the visitor’s room and catches sight of Luther, seated at a table with somebody short, young, and blond. He stills, watching carefully. 

“Listen,” the guard continues, not even noticing, “There’s some regulation by the foster system on this one, so you’ve only got a half-hour, okay? And you can’t be alone together, not that it’s really an option in there, but… just stick to the public area, okay?” 

Andrew’s been here long enough that when he brushes past the guard without a word, the guy isn’t even offended. 

Generally, Andrew doesn’t bother acknowledging how much information he actually takes in on a regular basis, because 99% of it just sits in the back of his mind, unused. But there are times where every detail of a scene is burned into his memory like a brand. This is one of those times. Andrew notices the harsh glow of the halogen lights on the scuffed, dirty tile, the family next to him arguing over plans for Christmas, the smell of McDonald’s in the air from the other side of the room. He sees Luther’s gaunt face turn towards him and his lips press together, just briefly. The bony hand reaching up to thumb the cross around his neck. Not happy to see Andrew, then, but always doing his Christian duty. 

And Aaron. Aaron is familiar, more familiar than anything Andrew’s ever seen, but also not quite right in the details. He’s the same height but his shoulders are curled inwards, protecting himself but making him look defensive, vulnerable. Andrew always slouches back in his chair to project boredom and dominance. Aaron is wearing a dark brown t-shirt under a blue hoodie, not black or standard-issue detention grey. His nose is broken, the curve in it just this much different from Andrew’s. He’s missing the divot above his lip Andrew got his freshman year from a hard fist and a big ring. A few spots of acne line his jaw. The pattern of calluses on his palms and knuckles is nearly identical - exy and fistfights - but his nails are neater. His hair is longer, cut better. His eyes are, the slightest bit, tinged red at the corner of the whites. And then Andrew reaches the table, and he leans in a little bit, and Aaron  _ flinches. _

Oh no. Oh,  _ no.  _ That won’t do. 

“Hello, Andrew.” Luther says, cautiously, breaking Andrew’s concentration. He doesn’t speak further than that, seeming to know that he’s not needed for this meeting. Instead, he sits back and watches them watch each other, and Andrew quickly forgets about him again. 

It’s uncomfortable. Andrew expected it to be uncomfortable. Whatever bullshit ‘twin bond’ they might have had if they’d grown up together is severed now, the ends twisted up in scar tissue. He’d questioned whether Aaron would even agree to come, after Andrew replied to his letter, essentially, with a ‘fuck off’. That Aaron is sitting before him, beaten and bruised and wary and still,  _ still,  _ willing to try, is…

Something. 

“Luther said you play Exy too?” Aaron says, after too long. His voice is thin and low. The question sounds exactly like what it is - a desperate attempt to start conversation. Andrew hates small talk, but he can stomach it just this once. 

“Goalie. You?” 

“Backliner. Only been playing for a year, though.” 

This little bit of something, this small thread of connection is enough to make Aaron smile tentatively. Andrew has never experienced this before, this innate feeling of  _ knowing _ for somebody he doesn’t really know. A small part of his brain tries to tell him what it is, but he stamps it down. He knows exactly how much ‘family’ means in real life. How much it means to him, the unwanted one, and how much it means to Aaron, the lucky one that can’t even look him in the eye. 

He looks at Aaron’s curled shoulders and feels a hot, dark possessiveness rise up inside him. Somebody has touched what belongs to him. Somebody has tried to  _ break  _ what is his, and Andrew doesn’t have much that he can lay claim to, but Aaron is on the list and Andrew will burn the world down around his ears to keep him safe if he has to. 

Somewhere inside himself, he finds a smile to mirror Aaron’s. It sits on his face wrongly, but it is enough for his twin. Andrew looks into a mirror, and he plans. 

\--

Mendez is not amused by the way Andrew storms into her office. 

“I want early release.” he says shortly. Mendez goes back to shuffling her papers, stone-faced. 

“Stop punching other kids, and I’ll see what I can do.” 

His first appeal gets denied. Andrew signs up for extra volunteer work, actually does his homework, and stops trying to kneecap his teammates at Exy practice. Juvie is no longer something to fill his time. Andrew has other things waiting for him. 

\--

He is released from Greenhall Juvenile Detention Facility a year later, into the righteous and pious arms of Luther Hemmick. Luther brings Andrew a change of clothes (short-sleeved, the wrong colour) and says nothing when Andrew comes out wearing his Greenhall hoodie over them, though he does frown a bit. Mendez sees him through the front door; she doesn’t say anything, but she gives him a firm nod, arms crossed over her chest. Andrew tilts his head at her and then, like that, Greenhall is a thing of the past. 

They eat an uncomfortable lunch together and then drive to the airport to catch a redeye flight back to Columbia. Andrew responds as well as he knows how to Luther’s stilted attempts at conversation. 

“Your mother wanted to be here, but she couldn’t get off work. She’ll be there at the airport, though.” 

_ She’s not my fucking mother,  _ Andrew thinks, but doesn’t say. He flashes back to his one meeting with his twin, the fear in his eyes and the forward slump of his shoulders. Andrew won’t jump to any conclusions before he has all the facts, but the man in the seat next to him, for all that he’s a pious fucking idiot, doesn’t have the guts to abuse someone. No, it must be Tilda. 

“I have a son, you know.” Luther continues. “He’s a few years older than you. I don’t think I mentioned him before.” 

“You didn’t.” Andrew says, staring out the window. He wants a cigarette, but doesn’t think Luther will take kindly to his sinful habits. Candy will do, if he can get it. 

“Nicholas is a good boy, but misguided. We made the mistake of sending him on a study abroad trip to Germany his senior year of high school, but he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of taking care of himself yet.” Luther lets out a sigh that sounds appropriately fatherly and weary. “I worry about him. He’s decided to stay over there, and I’m afraid he may be making sinful choices. Perhaps knowing he has another cousin waiting for him in South Carolina will bring him back.” 

_ Jesus Christ,  _ Andrew thinks with a bit of irony. Another reject from the family, screwed up by the people that were supposed to love him. He’s gaining a whole collection. If Nicholas is smart - and it sounds like he is - he’ll stay in Germany and never come back. 

They make it to the airport just in time, and Andrew realizes only as he buckles the belt across his lap that the idea of hurtling through space at several hundred miles an hour, several thousand feet above the ground, makes him break out into a cold sweat. He  _ really  _ wants a goddamn cigarette, but settles for gripping the armrests so tightly that his knuckles turn white. 

Luther falls asleep before the plane even takes off. Andrew spends the whole five hour flight staring at the seat-back in front of him and breathing slowly and evenly. Things get slightly better when the stewardess brings by a glass of water with a napkin. Andrew holds the cold water cup to his forehead and shreds the napkin into tiny slivers. 

When they walk through security and into the lobby of the airport, his gaze is caught immediately by a small, slight figure with a shock of blonde hair and curled-in shoulders. His eyes trace the woman next to him, a middle-aged woman in scrubs with a prematurely lined face and an impatient look. As they get closer, Andrew starts to pick out familiar features - flashing hazel eyes, a wide mouth, thick brows. She shares a razor-thin nose with Luther, as well as his dark hair, though hers is lightened by sickeningly fake highlights. 

That’s as much attention as she deserves. Andrew turns back to his twin, who has his arms crossed over his chest and is looking at him from half-lidded eyes. Closed-off. Distrustful. Andrew meets his stare, and he doesn’t smile, but he holds Aaron’s gaze for long enough that Aaron shifts. 

“Matilda.” Luther says when they meet in the middle of the lobby, smiling slightly. The woman steps forward and accepts his embrace, not much more than a quick squeeze on her upper arms and a kiss to the air beside her cheek. “Let me introduce you to your son, Andrew.” 

The woman turns her attention to Andrew. Now, Andrew does smile, as nicely as he knows how. But it’s difficult to do when he looks at her. There’s something in his face that he doesn’t like, a hardness in her eyes, a stiffness in her smile. If Andrew is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, then Tilda is a vulture, posing as a songbird. 

If Andrew were younger, stupider, he may have fallen for this. He might have forgotten that she gave him up at birth like so much trash, and tumble into her arms. He might dream of shared dinners and warm embraces. 

But this Andrew looks away from the woman and to his other half, who is trying to pretend that he’s not crossing his arms just to support a recently-dislocated shoulder, and feels a dark rumble in his chest. 

This woman has touched what is his. She will pay - not today, not tomorrow, but soon enough. 

“Mom.” he says, a touch of warmth in his voice. The woman opens her arms, and Andrew steps into them. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update! Life got crazy. 
> 
> At some point, the updates will get less regular because I'll run out of stuff I've already written, but that won't be for a while yet.


	11. Chapter 11

Andrew knew that something was wrong.    
  
He just didn’t know  _ how _ wrong. 

\--

The spring semester of their junior year is a total shitshow. 

The word about Aaron (who’s been at Macon for a year already) having a twin hasn’t gotten around yet, so people keep coming up to Andrew and talking about classes he’s not in, people he’s never met, things he’s never done. 

Andrew quickly realizes that he can use this to his advantage, and begins gathering information. He learns to imitate Aaron’s quirks and habits - the way he chews his lip, rubs at the crook of his left elbow, avoids eye contact. He learns that Aaron is slow to make friends but quick to anger, attentive when he’s in class but absent too often to make up. His teachers keep him after class and ask in quiet voices if everything is all right at home, but Aaron manages a smile and a deflection for them, and Matilda Minyard is good at turning on the charm when she comes in for parent-teacher conferences. Aaron fights, but only when he won’t get caught, or when he knows it will look like self-defense. It’s a good system, because when he turns up with a black eye or a limp, he can concoct a sob story about getting jumped after school. 

Poor little Aaron Minyard. Broken family. Delinquent twin brother. A perfect target for bullies. Overall, he’s the perfect teenager to get passed over and forgotten. Everybody knows something is wrong and nobody does anything about it. 

Matilda is meticulous about keeping her ‘motherly affections’ between her and Aaron at home. She blows hot and cold with Andrew, doting on him and ignoring him in turns, but Andrew can always tell by Aaron’s snappishness and the hastily covered bandages in the trash cans when he’s just missed their bonding time. 

Andrew smiles, and talks, and pretend he can’t see what’s right in front of his face. Aaron oscillates wildly between hesitant conversations and wild anger, fueled by hurt and abuse and his mother’s cocaine. He is like a wild animal, beaten and starving, too feral somedays to let Andrew touch him but too hungry to have any other option. Andrew weathers it all steadfastly. 

And he plans. 

\--

“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Minyard. If this behavior doesn’t change, you’re looking at expulsion. Do you understand how serious that is?” 

Patronizing. That’s Andrew’s least favourite tone of voice, especially coming from a woman who’s had two divorces and barely speaks to her kids. A real star of a high school counselor. 

“I understand, Mrs. Harris. It’s just been…” 

Trail off. Look to the side. A tiny frown, just enough to make him look frustrated and a bit lost. 

The counselor’s stern expression breaks and turns to one of concern. She leans forward; from this distance, Andrew can see her smudged lipstick and oily t-zone. She smells like fake baby powder and too many cats. 

“Aaron,” she says softly, “Is everything alright? I know things must be difficult, with your twin moving in…” 

Oh, if only she knew how right she was. If only she was aware that things were difficult enough that the boy she  _ thought  _ she was talking to was at home, sweating through a bad high with a possible broken rib, while Andrew came to his academic probation meeting and tried to salvage his GPA. 

On good days, Aaron would tell Andrew tentatively about his plans for the future. That he wanted to be a doctor, with a beautiful wife and a nice house and the chance to volunteer on the weekends, helping kids like him make it through life. On bad days, Aaron would curl up on his bed, sheets wrapped around him, and mutter into his pillow. No future. Worth nothing. _ Failure. _

“Yeah.” Andrew says, after a minute. Voice soft, a bit regretful. “I mean, you know how Andrew is. It’s been… hard.” 

The counselor smiles. Of course she swallows his fake crying hook, line, and sinker. People are all too ready to accept the bullshit they’re fed, and the counselor is no exception. 

“You’re a good kid, Aaron. I’ll talk with your teachers and see what we can do for extra credit. And if you ever need someone to talk to, I’m here. Sometimes just talking helps more than we think.” 

Talking has already solved one of his problems, in the form of keeping Aaron from expulsion. No need for any more. Andrew stands up, gives the counselor Aaron’s trademark lopsided smile, and tries not to flinch when she accepts his outstretched hand for a shake that turns into a gentle squeeze. 

When he gets home, Tilda is at work, and Aaron’s door is locked. Andrew jimmies the doorknob, pushes the door open, and flicks the lights on. A soft groan comes from the vicinity of the bed. The room smells like sweat and the stench of unwashed teenage boy. Andrew steps over the piles of dirty clothing, moldy plates, and scattered books, and yanks the sheet down off of his twin’s head. Aaron, sickly and pale, squeezes his eyes shut against the light and covers his face with one hand. 

“Aaron.” Andrew says impassively. One bloodshot hazel eye glares up at him. “We need to talk.” 

“...the fuck out of my room….” Aaron says weakly. Andrew ignores that, as he does everything else his brother says while high or coming down, and keeps staring down at him. 

“Medical schools don’t take washed-up junkies that fail out of high school.” 

Sometimes a blunt statement like that is enough to shock Aaron into coping again. This time, he just turns his face into his dirty, yellowed pillow and mutters something. 

“Big boy voice.” Andrew says, and dodges Aaron’s kneejerk angry swing. 

“Fuck you.” Aaron says venomously, now looking at Andrew with both eyes. “You think you can just come in here and fucking fix me? I’m so far past rock bottom you might as well just put up a headstone. I’m not  _ you.  _ I can’t fucking do this.” 

It’s near the end of his sentence, when Aaron’s voice starts to crack, that Andrew knows this is more than just Aaron’s come-down talking. Aaron tries to hide the wetness in his eyes by turning his face back into the pillow, but he should know better than to think Andrew won’t notice. Andrew had known his brother was broken, but here he is in pieces, and if Andrew doesn’t put him back together soon, there will be no hope for him. 

“Aaron.” Andrew says. His brother doesn’t move. “ _ Aaron.  _ Look at me. Do you trust me?” 

The words are out before Andrew realizes he doesn’t want to hear the answer to that question, but Aaron does look at him, and it’s with a puzzled frown, like Andrew has just asked the world’s stupidest question. 

“You’re my brother, you asshole.” Aaron says shortly. “Of course I do.” 

There is the dull pang of…  _ something… _ in his chest. A distraction. Andrew ignores it. 

“I’m your brother.” Andrew agrees. “It’s just you and me. If you stay with me, I’ll get you to graduation.” He stops for a moment, not because he doesn’t mean the words he’s about to say, but because he wants Aaron to understand just how  _ much  _ he means them. “I promise.” 

Aaron has buried his face back into the pillow, but he tilts enough so that one eye looks out at Andrew. Hazel, with a ring of golden-brown around the iris, just like the one that Andrew sees in the mirror every day. 

Andrew would set the whole world on fire for this boy. 

“Okay.” Aaron says. Quietly. Honestly. “Now get the fuck out, will you?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure I'm entirely satisfied with Aaron's characterization, so I may edit this chapter at some point. Let me know what you think.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An extra little warning for Tilda, because she says some nasty things to Andrew in this chapter.

Andrew tries to move quickly, but things take time. Weeks are spent grooming Aaron to do as he says. Andrew had enrolled in a human bio class at the beginning of the semester; now he deliberately botches homework assignments and fails tests until the teacher stops him after class and asks quietly for a meeting. Andrew acquiesces. 

Andrew lets himself into Aaron’s room one day, his beloved brother passed out in his bed and shivering, and finds not a smeared line of white powder, but a pipe. When he yanks the covers of, he finds that both the pillow and Aaron’s face are smeared with blood. Nosebleed. Aaron’s heart is racing, and his eyes are nearly black from the size of his dilated pupils. 

For the first time, Andrew wonders if he may lose Aaron before he can save him. 

\--

“I need them to think I’m trying.” Andrew tells Aaron, when he asks Aaron to stand in for him at his human bio meeting. Aaron is having one of his better days; he’s clean and showered and as coherent as he seems to get lately. Andrew can’t appreciate much, but he can appreciate how Aaron can let his mother’s drugs rot away his brain while simultaneously acing any test about the human body.

“You’re  _ not _ trying.” Aaron tells him flatly. But he takes the clothes from Andrew’s hand, parts his hair until they look roughly the same, and catches the bus to Macon High to sit in on Andrew’s study session with his teacher. 

Andrew wants a cigarette, but Aaron doesn’t smoke, so he refrains. Instead, he digs through Aaron’s closet, throws on one of his old Exy sweatshirts, and flops down on the couch to wait. 

Tilda comes in a half hour later. Her dark hair is greasy, flattened to her scalp by the hair net she has to wear at work. From the looks of her, she’s been sober all day and is all the more pissed for it. She kicks her shoes off, dumps her bag by the door, and settles her vicious gaze on Andrew. 

Contrary to every instinct in Andrew’s body, he flinches away from her gaze and curls into himself. Tilda’s eyes darken in anger.  

Twenty minutes later, Andrew is on his bike, pedaling his way towards Luther and Maria’s house. It’s not easy to do when the motion jolts his hurting ribs and his left eye is swollen shut, but he’s done more with less. It’s just mildly inconvenient, is all, and he still can’t smoke. His fingers twitch against the handlebars, jonesing for a cigarette. 

Luther and Maria are sitting down to a nice dinner, heads bowed in prayer, when Andrew stumbles in the front door. Maria takes one look at him and gasps; Luther’s eyes go wide. Andrew collapses on the couch in the front room and feels the blood rushing through his body. 

“Oh my god, Aaron, what happened to you?” Maria cries, once she’s found her voice. She falls to her knees next to him and places a tentative hand on his cheek. Luther follows her into the living room and looms over her shoulder. Andrew slowly parses the sensation of Maria’s hand on his cheek and allows himself to groan. 

“Mom,” he grits out, as if it hurts to speak. Their faces turn pale, shocked, like there was no fucking way they could have guessed this. Typical. Andrew lets his eyes flutter shut dramatically, because he’s tired of looking at them. 

Maria fetches him a cold compress to put on his eye, while Luther storms into the kitchen. Andrew can hear clattering, and then Luther’s voice, pitched low and angry. The smell of their baked meatloaf makes Andrew’s stomach turn, but the compress helps. 

It’s twenty minutes before Tilda shows up. Luther and Maria don’t attempt to speak to Andrew any more, but he can feel their stares on his face. They’re not stupid; neither of them want to accept what he’s saying, but they saw the signs a long time ago. They knew Tilda had been spiralling down into destruction, they just refused to acknowledge it. Their mistake. 

The door cracks open, so hard it bangs against the wall. Luther moves to intercept his sister before she gets to Andrew. Tilda is wide-eyed, wild and probably halfway to oblivion by now, considering Andrew knows she’d been shooting up when he snuck out of the house. It’s a wonder that she didn’t kill herself on the drive over. A pity, but then Andrew wouldn’t get to put his own personal spin on it. 

“Matilda, did you do this? Did you do this to Aaron?” Luther asks her, his voice icy. Nice to see that he can give a shit when the truth is shoved into his face. Maybe Andrew should have arranged for Luther to walk in on him and Drake. He wouldn’t have called it a  _ misunderstanding  _ then. 

Even through her drug-induced haze, Tilda must realize that she won’t get anywhere with threats and intimidation. Her voice goes soft and pleading as she speaks to her brother. Andrew opens his one good eye to watch them. 

“Luther, it’s just a misunderstanding. Aaron, he… he’s not been right, not for a while now. I know it got out of hand, but we’re going to fix it.” 

It’s a laughable attempt. Luther thinks so too, clearly, but any more arguing is antithetical to the rest of Andrew’s plan. He’d gotten what he came here for. Tilda’s secret is out to Luther and Maria. Now it’s time to move to the next step. 

“Uncle Luther, it’s okay. She’s right, it got out of hand.” Andrew sits up, hands the compress carefully back to Maria, and attempts a small, shaky smile for them. Aaron would never smile like this, but nobody in this room knows his brother well enough to notice. They see him smiling, and they think,  _ maybe everything will be okay.  _ “Let’s go home, Mom. We’ll work this out.” 

To their credit, Maria and Luther put up half-hearted protests. To their discredit, Andrew sees in their eyes that they’d rather Tilda and Andrew leave right now, so they can go back to pretending their little world is beautiful and nothing hurts. Andrew can feel it in the hug that Maria gives him, in the way Luther’s eyes flick away from Andrew’s instead of meeting them squarely. No wonder his cousin had fucked off to Germany. He’s never met Nicky, but Andrew guesses he must be one of the only smart ones in the family. 

They go outside, and Tilda gets in the driver’s seat of her little, worn-out Honda Civic while Andrew takes the passenger’s. He could sit in the back, where he would be safer, but he doesn’t. This isn’t about his safety. It’s about honouring a promise. Aaron’s bike is left at Luther and Maria’s; if he wants it, he can come fucking get it. 

“What the hell are you playing at, Andrew?” Tilda says, turning to him. Her pupils are dilated and she smells like shit; Andrew has no idea how Luther and Maria have managed to pretend for so long that they don’t know what’s going on. Willful ignorance, he supposes. 

“Figured it out, did you? Gold star for mommy.” he says lazily. When Tilda raises her hand towards him, he grabs her by the wrist and twists until she lets out a cry of pain and goes limp. Andrew squeezes once, hard, and lets go. Tilda doesn’t try to hit him again. 

“I don’t know why I ever let Luther bring you here.” she says darkly as she starts the car and guides it jerkily out onto the road. “I should have left you in that damn prison where you belong.” 

“Your words cut deep, mother dearest. I think I feel a tear coming on. I know it’s hard when you’re coming down from your crack high, but try not to kill us both driving home, yes?” 

Tilda is having trouble staying in her lane, though it’s not bad enough that Andrew is worried. Besides, the road is empty. Tilda’s favored drug only has a twenty minute lifespan at best, so Andrew knows she has to be crashing right now. That’s why she’s sweating, though it’s cold outside, and gritting her teeth as she takes a turn at twenty miles over the speed limit. 

“You know, I knew when you two were born that there was something wrong with you.” Tilda continues. Her tone is nasty. “Aaron was a normal little baby. He cried and laughed and held my finger. 

“You, though. You just  _ looked  _ at me. I knew there was a screw loose somewhere in your head. No baby is that calm. So I dumped you two off, but then I figured, maybe Aaron could be saved. Maybe he hadn’t been infected with whatever messed you up. So I took him back, and hoped I’d never see your evil little face again. I should have told my brother to stuff it when he suggested bringing you here. Aaron was a good son until you showed up.” 

Andrew searches deep inside him for some semblance of emotion about this revelation, and comes up with nothing. So he’d been dumped because he hadn’t cried enough. Another entry on his list of failures as a human being, he supposes. No one can say that Andrew isn’t consistent. 

The sky is dark already, and the stretch of highway is mostly deserted. The little two lane road is one that locals take at fifteen miles above the speed limit, because they know the curves and where the cops sit with their radars. Tilda has worked herself up into a fine rant by this point; Andrew’s tuned her out in favour of watching out the windshield, but she doesn’t seem to care. 

The truck coming from the opposite direction is big, black, and has a nasty grill on it like a manic, grinning mouth. It has double sets of lights that are blinding to look at. It could probably plow through a whole line of Honda Civics and come out fine. 

“Slow down.” Andrew says. Tilda lets out a questioning noise. 

“Slow. Down.” he says again, with force. Tilda reaches over to slap him for the disrespect, but her foot pumps the brake all the same. The truck is barreling towards them, chrome flashing in the night. 

“Goodbye, Tilda.” Andrew says, and he jerks the steering wheel. 


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you guys enjoyed the tentative relationship between Andrew and Aaron, because now we're going to break it.

Andrew wakes, and someone is on top of him. 

He lashes out, though his limbs feel weak as a kitten’s. Something, a fist probably, slams into his cheek.

“You  _ fucking bastard.”  _ Aaron roars. Andrew’s brain is barely functional enough to understand his words. “You fucking  _ killed her,  _ you psychotic -” 

Andrew drives a knee up; Aaron is dislodged and falls off the bed. The room spins. Then there is another voice, and the sound of someone shouting orders, and then things quiet down. 

“Mr. Minyard, are you still with me?” 

Andrew cracks an eye. An older man in a pair of pink patterned scrubs hovers over him. 

“I’m sorry that you had to wake up to that. Your brother is having a very hard time coping. We’ll make sure that he’s watched very carefully if he comes back for a visit.” 

Andrew tries to say something, but his eye slides shut without his permission, and then he’s gone again. 

\--

The next time he wakes, he does so with enough coherency to actually take in the world around him. 

There is a white ceiling, and beige walls, and an IV machine next to the hospital bed that he’s laying in. His body, for the most part, fails to respond to what he asks of it. He does manage to turn his head a little, enough to notice that somebody is slouched in one of the chairs on the side of his bed, leg jiggling nervously as he reads a magazine. 

“Hey.” Andrew says to him. His voice croaks painfully. 

The figure looks up, and then scrambles from his chair. Andrew doesn’t know him, but he seems - familiar, somehow. Something about the thin blade of his nose, his dark skin, the wavy black of his hair. 

“Oh my god, you’re finally awake! You’re been out, like, forever, I was afraid you’d never wake up!” the young man says. The magazine he’s clutching, a copy of  _ Cosmopolitan,  _ flies through the air as he gestures wildly. “How are you feeling? Should I call the nurse? Are you hungry?” 

“Who,” Andrew swallows against his dry throat, “the fuck are you?” 

The man looks taken aback for a moment, then his expression goes sheepish. 

“Oh, right, sorry. I’m Nicky. Your, uh, your cousin. I don’t know if my parents mentioned me, I’ve been in Germany but I flew in as soon as I heard about Ti - about the accident. Wish we could’ve met under better circumstances.” 

“Is Tilda dead?” Andrew asks. The stricken look on Nicky’s face confirms it for him. Good. Another accident so soon after the first wouldn’t have looked ‘accidental’. “Where is my brother?” 

Nicky licks his lips nervously and looks away. Point for Andrew, as he’s currently bedridden and weak as a kitten, and thus shouldn’t be that intimidating. 

“He’s… not coping well.” Nicky says. Andrew can see in the tense line of his shoulders that he’s hiding something. Andrew thinks he knows what it is. 

“What did he say?” Andrew asks. Nicky winces. Andrew repeats the question. 

“He…” Nicky stops and swallows, one hand snapping at a rubber band on his wrist.  _ Fwap. Fwap. Fwap.  _ “He… thinks you did it. That you killed Tilda. I mean, I told him that was crazy. He’s just trying to figure it out, you know? Sometimes it helps to have someone to blame.” 

Nicky, Andrew notes, is doing a fantastic job of attempting to reassure him, while also shooting anxious looks his way to see how he reacts to this information. Nicky also believes he may have done it. Interesting, but not relevant. There’s no proof. 

Is he upset that Aaron thinks he did it? Andrew searches inside himself, trying to see if he feels one way or the other about it. No, he decides. Aaron is willing to accept pretty lies when he wants to, but he’s not stupid. It’s good that he chooses to see the truth of Andrew. And when he hears the whole story, Aaron will understand. 

They’re brothers, after all. 

“Get out of my room.” Andrew says to Nicky. Nicky stumbles to his feet and does just that. 

\--

Andrew doesn’t find out until a week later, when he is able to stay awake for more than a half-hour at a time, that a custody battle has been started, fought through, and decided in his absence. 

Nicholas Hemmick, 19 years old, has received custody of Andrew and Aaron Minyard. Andrew is surprised at the backbone his dear cousin is showing. Ultimately, it makes things easier. Staying with Luther and Maria Hemmick would have been a headache he didn’t need. 

Andrew notes that Luther does not come to visit. 

The day of Andrew’s discharge, Nicky shows up with a change of clothes and a nervous smile. Andrew accepts the clothes, refuses the smile, and  _ absolutely  _ refuses the offer of help changing by slamming the bathroom door in Nicky’s face. 

Andrew is still weak, and that is enough to start a tremor in his hands that he doesn’t particularly care for. He’ll need to get back to the gym right away. In the meantime, while he’s building up his strength, he’ll need his knives more accessible. He has none right now, because he hadn’t been carrying any when he’d killed Tilda. 

No time to deal with that now, though. He has a lot to do. 

The car Nicky’s brought to the hospital is a rental, a blue minivan that Andrew hates on sight. It’ll have to go. Another thing for the checklist. Tilda had always bitched about how irritating it was for see ‘stupid assholes waste their money on fancy cars just to show off’. A good enough reason to waste her insurance money buying one, he thinks. Something dark, expensive, and angry. 

When he spots a grocery store, he points to it, arm in Nicky’s face. Nicky, in the middle of prattling on about the house he’d found for them, cuts off mid-sentence. 

“Stop there.” 

Nicky frowns. “Uh, alright. Having a craving?” 

Interesting that Nicky is still trying to make jokes, after having met Andrew at least a half-dozen times now. Interesting that he’s still so hurt when Andrew doesn’t laugh at them. Nicky pulls into a parking spot and follows Andrew into the store. 

Andrew picks things that are safe to store at room temperature and don’t need to be heated to be eaten. Trail mix, protein bars, chips, packets of tuna. Nicky pushes the cart, frowning at his choices, but offering only tentative rebukes. Andrew ends in the frozen foods aisle, where he adds three pints of mocha fudge avalanche before heading to the small hardware section. 

When they arrive at the house, Andrew dumps the bags and goes to check on Aaron. Nicky follows nervously, appearing to be concerned about Andrew’s reaction. Andrew pushes the door to Aaron’s room open, and sees why. 

The room reeks of chemicals and burnt plastic, as well as something more organically pungent. There are dirty clothes all over the floor. A pair of basketball shorts, lying crumpled at the side of the bed, is soaked in vomit. Andrew’s beloved brother is a shivering lump, twisted in the sheets. 

Andrew crosses to the bed, checks his pulse, looks at his pupils. Aaron is unresponsive, but not dead. Only barely not dead, to be honest. If it weren’t for the trembling and the sweating, he’d be the picture-perfect image of a corpse. 

Andrew didn’t want it to get this far, but it’s not too late yet. He can fix it. He’s going to fix it. 

When he turns, Nicky is standing inside the room, arms crossed over his chest in a way that makes him look small and a little bit scared. His knuckles are white from the way he’s clutching at himself. Nicky meets Andrew’s eyes, then looks away, taking a shuddering breath. 

Emotional. Andrew isn’t sure if it’s a normal reaction to the situation, or if Nicky is particularly sensitive. He doesn’t know how close Nicky and Aaron are. Doesn’t know if Nicky still believes in family, or has some bullshit religious hang-up about drugs.  He’s an undefined variable that needs closer examination. 

All relevant thoughts, but for later. Andrew returns to his task. 

\--

It’s roughly a half hour later when he returns to Aaron’s room. Nicky has started cleaning in his absence; the dirty clothes are gone, as is the pipe and the drug residue that had been strewn across the nightstand. 

Andrew grabs Aaron by the arm and yanks him from the bed. Aaron comes up swinging, but his aim is so wild he hits a table lamp instead, knocking it to the floor with a harsh clatter. Andrew traps his drug-weakened arms to his chest and drags him to the bathroom. 

Inside, he’s shoved the bags of food to the side of the toilet. A pillow and a nest of blankets, laid out on top of a yoga mat he’d found in Nicky’s room, takes up most of the floor space. The tap water from the sink is potable, if funny-tasting. A selection of books from one of Aaron’s unopened moving boxes sits on the sink. 

Andrew manhandles Aaron into the bathroom, sits him on the closed toilet seat, and backs out of the room. Slamming the door shut, he quickly flips the freshly installed latch on the bathroom door shut and inserts the heavy duty key lock through it. There’s a chance Aaron might be able to kick the door down if he tries hard enough, but only if he does it in the next 24 hours or so, Andrew imagines. Once he hits withdrawal, he’ll be far too weak to do it. 

Nicky’s presence appears behind him immediately. 

“Oh my God, Andrew. Did you - is Aaron - oh my God. We can’t do this. We -” 

Nicky cuts off. The bathroom is ominously silent for a moment longer. Then the doorknob jiggles. Pause. Jiggles harder. An impatient hand knocks on the door itself. 

Silently, Nicky and Andrew watch the door. The knocking gets louder, more aggressive.

“This isn’t fuckin’ funny.” Aaron slurs.  _ Bang. Bang.  _ “Lemme t’fuck out. Lemme  _ out.”  _

It’s a few long minutes of listening to Aaron’s unintelligible babbling before Nicky asks, “We’re just going to… to  _ leave him there?  _ For how long?”    
Nicky reaches for the door to the bathroom, but freezes when Andrew’s hand wraps around his wrist. 

Andrew says, “As long as it takes. Unless you want to come home one day to his corpse stinking up the house.” 

Andrew doesn’t generally mean to be cruel, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t come across that way sometimes. This must be one of those times, because Nicky lets out a wounded sound and flees. Andrew watches him disappear down the hallway before seating himself next to the bathroom. Aaron has progressed to yelling and battering at the door. 

Andrew wants a cigarette. Maybe he’ll go grab a carton of ice cream later. 

“Let me  _ out,  _ you fuckin’ cocksucker! You goddamn  _ CUNT!”  _ Aaron screams through the door. It’s a good thing they don’t have neighbors very close. Andrew chews on a sliver of a nail and then inspects it. 

The banging lasts for about an hour before it dissolves into endless rambling. That phase lasts for thirty minutes, then turns into screaming again. The door lock holds up against the abuse Aaron rains on it. Andrew leaves, four hours in, but only to snatch a carton of ice cream and a spoon. 

“Why the hell are you doing this?” Aaron says at some point. His voice is thick with misery. He’s given up on rage to, Andrew suspects, curl up on the floor and be sick. “Thought you were my brother.” 

“That’s why I’m doing it.” Andrew informs him. “Because I’m your brother. Stupid.” 

“You killed our mom.” Aaron whispers. “Now you’re trying to kill me. I hate you. Wish you were dead.” 

Aaron is, at this point, incoherent. Nicky is having a breakdown in his room, thinking he’s being quiet about it. The hallway is empty, the walls blindingly bare. No one to hear him. 

“So do I.” Andrew says. Behind him, Aaron is muttering a mess of incomprehensible insults. He doesn’t hear what Andrew says, too bent on his own misery. 

Andrew says, “I expect better insults out of you tomorrow. There’s only so much time I can spend staring at a wall with nothing to entertain me.” 

Aaron eventually supplies them. Andrew listens passively, sometimes smoking, sometimes tracing the scars on his arms. His hands are still trembling in a way he doesn’t like. Nicky comes by and cries at him, only leaving when Aaron’s begging gets too hard to handle. 

Through it all, Andrew stays, as still and unmoving as stone. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick heads up: 
> 
> 1\. We're at the end of the pre-written stuff, so updates will be slower.   
> 2\. It's the end of the semester for me, so I'll be headed home and thus won't have much time to write until I'm settled in. Sorry!  
> 3\. I absolutely edited this after three shots of whiskey and a beer, so it's sappy and probably poorly edited and sorry not sorry ANGST ANGST ANGST

There had technically been a month still left, but they’d been excused from it due to Tilda’s untimely and very tragic accidental death. Andrew had wasted two weeks of it slipping in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed. As Aaron is riding out his withdrawals, Andrew snatches his laptop from his room and emails his and Aaron’s teachers, who are very sorry for his loss and would be happy to let them finish out the year electronically, if they’re up to it. 

Andrew just scrapes by with D’s, but Aaron manages to hold onto his 3.5 GPA (it takes a few days of cramming, because Andrew doesn’t know jack shit about physics, but he catches himself up with plenty of time to spare and Aaron earns an A- in that class). Both of them will start senior year as planned. They just have to get through the summer, and Aaron’s withdrawal, first. 

Nicky hovers at the bathroom door in increasingly irritating amounts in between his bouts of crying in his bedroom. Andrew gathers that Nicky had left behind a boyfriend in Germany, who he calls and Skypes frequently. Eric does not suggest that Nicky leave Andrew and Aaron to come back. Andrew determines that, for now, Eric can stay. 

Nicky also goes out at some point and gets a job at a shitty bar. None of them truly  _ need  _ a job, not once Tilda’s life insurance comes through, but Andrew suspects that Nicky will take any excuse to get out of the house. He doesn’t seem like he enjoys the company of his dear cousins very much. He and Aaron are both close enough to eighteen that if Nicky decides to cut and run, they can file for emancipation. But Nicky strikes him as the clingy type. 

Five days in, Andrew is drowsing against the wall outside the bathroom when the painful sound of breaking glass jolts him into awareness. He has the door open in seconds, and then he’s smashed up against his brother over the closed toilet seat, wrestling a jagged piece of the mirror out of Aaron’s bloody hands. Aaron howls, and curses, and lashes out at Andrew with the glass, nearly catching him in the eye, but Andrew finally gets his hands on it and yanks it from Aaron’s grasp. 

It’s like a goddamn Quentin Tarantino movie - blood everywhere, all over their hands and their clothes and the tile floor, the broken pieces of mirror reflecting wild shots of him and Aaron, themselves like mirror images. Aaron shouts, crazed, his voice echoing off the walls. Andrew scrabbles to grab Aaron’s hands. Somewhere behind them, there’s a clatter and a sharp inhale of breath. 

“Oh, Jesus -  _ Andrew,  _ get off of him, let me -” 

Nicky is suddenly present in the cramped space as well. He grabs at Andrew’s shoulder to pull his off Aaron. Aaron has one hand on Andrew’s chest and the other buried in his hair. Andrew’s eye catches a piece of mirror on the floor, angled just right to show bruised skin- 

The nausea rises immediately. Andrew barely restrains himself from sinking his elbow into Nicky’s face and stumbles back out of the bathroom instead, desperate to break contact and find space. 

It takes a few minutes for the situation to settle down. Andrew’s eyes are focused on the unbroken pale eggshell colour of the hallway wall. He doesn’t know how long it’s quiet before he notices the lack of noise. He has to move his gaze to the bathroom slowly, inch by inch through sheer force of will, and it feels like an eternity before he sees the inside of the room. 

Nicky is slumped on the floor, back against the bathtub. Aaron is curled up limply against his chest. Aaron’s eyes are bloodshot, the skin under them a bruised purple. He’s become so gaunt that his cheekbones stick out like knifeblades, and Nicky’s hands are circling his thin wrists easily. Pulled up against Nicky, he looks comatose. He looks dead. Nicky cards one hand carefully through Aaron’s greasy hair, his eyes intense and strange. 

“Hey, hey, it’s okay…” Nicky says. His voice is thick, stilted.  “Remember when we used to fall asleep like this when we were kids, when you guys came to visit? No one knows it, but you’re a total cuddlebug, huh?” 

Aaron, eyes still closed, lets out a thin, mournful sound, and turns his body into Nicky’s. Nicky’s smile flickers down at him. Then he looks up at Andrew. 

“Can you just… can you just give us a minute? I’ll clean up the glass, okay?” 

Andrew’s eyes dart down the mess on the tile, the blood swiped across the toilet lid, the quiet expression on Aaron’s face as Nicky pets his hair. The whole scene is so soft at the edges as if to be unreal. It’s like a watercolour painting, a mere simulation of a reality that's far too sharp to exist in these dulcet tones.

Andrew kicks the door shut and stalks into the kitchen.

He’s still holding the bloody piece of mirror he’d wrestled from Aaron; it’s left a huge slice in his palm that stings when he clenches his fist. There’s a shallow cut on his cheek as well, and his clothes are covered in blood.

The kitchen feels a hundred times more  _ real  _ to him than the scene in the bathroom had. Blood, pain, and the semblance of normal life, all clashing together. Andrew sets about to washing out the wounds and dressing them, listening absently for snippets of whatever Nicky is doing in the bathroom. 

So his dear cousin has a parental streak. It’s not surprising that Nicky is emotional in that way - Nicky appears to be emotional in  _ every  _ way, all the time - but Andrew hadn’t pegged him as the brotherly type. He’s seemed more liable to break down in the face of adversity than take control of it, and yet he’s the one in the bathroom now, taking care of Andrew’s twin…

It doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t matter, Andrew doesn’t need to actively think that. It doesn’t matter. Tilda and Luther were siblings, and Aaron and Nicky had probably spent a lot of time together as kids. Nicky is disgustingly emotional, in a way that anybody would tolerate if they were as bugged out as Aaron is right now. And he's basically a child; if he needs to feel like his clutching at Aaron is important in some way, let him. Andrew will do the hard work of getting Aaron clean, whether Aaron wants to be or not. He’ll mop the bathroom, and keep the house swept, and he’ll be the person outside the door that makes the hard decisions and saves Aaron from himself. 

It doesn’t matter. 

The water starts in the bathroom. Good. Aaron is disgusting and needs to be bathed. Let Nicky baby him through this. Andrew doesn’t have the capacity for it. 

He goes outside to smoke a cigarette. 


End file.
